Archive of Our Own

How could anyone handle this? Rachel thought as she sat next to Quinn on a packed train headed for New York City. How could anyone survive this?

It hadn’t been an intentional thing. She felt that it was important to stress that. Most if not all of her interactions with Quinn had been accidental - they’d ended up together in the Glee Club by chance, they’d ended up dating the same guy by chance, they’d ended up having the same idea for the first week of winter break by chance.

What Quinn Fabray wanted from New York, Rachel had no clue, but she couldn’t exactly ask her, because they were both sitting here and waiting and watching the slow death of Americana crawl by (Rachel had given up on counting the amount of oil rigs after seeing five) and Quinn was listening to something through a pair of bulky headphones and there was something so strangely endearing about it.

The train was much too loud for Rachel to figure what she was listening to. Not for the first time she wished she’d made it in time to get the quiet car, but it was full, as it so often was. And the silence would have driven her off her rocker if her iPod had died partway through anyway and everything would’ve been silent, anyway, so it was probably for the best, considering how her iPod had died partway through. The outlet next to her window was taken up by Quinn’s e-reader, so plugging the thing in was out of the question.

Really, it had been an accident.

What they didn’t tell you about taking trips to the Big Apple when you lived in a small town in Ohio was that there wasn’t an easy route to it. There was a train and then a bus and then a smaller train and then another bus and then the great cinematic moment where the whole city rose up to greet them. In a characteristic moment of bold-faced lying, Rachel had insisted that she would be fine doing this on her own, her lack of a driver’s license and experience with the outside world notwithstanding.

Unfortunately, her dads had refused, and most everyone else had plans, and just as she’d resigned herself to giving up on the entire endeavor (perhaps the first time she had ever given up on anything in her life), Quinn Fabray had shown up at her door with a duffel bag and a challenge in her eye.

Rachel hadn’t stood a chance.

All of this meant that the two of them were sitting here, each other’s chaperone and worst nightmare, as the train sped along.

Anyone with half a sense of how things would go wouldn’t have agreed to go on this thing at all. Rachel knew that. However, she also wanted to go to New York, and she knew how to slip into a crowd - she’d been working on not doing that for most of her life, but her several failed attempts meant that, well, she could still be invisible when she wanted.

She just never really did.

“You could’ve just taken a plane,” Quinn said, the first thing she’d said since they’d boarded the train.

“It’s more affordable this way. Considering how college tuition is becoming more expensive, it’s important to save when we can.” What it was that Quinn did to her that made Rachel rattle off facts like that, she didn’t know, but it didn’t stop her from doing it.

She’d given up on denying her feelings, by the way, and had instead decided it was probably best just not to mention them. Things went away if you pressed them down for long enough. And she knew that she’d be leaving most everyone from McKinley behind when she graduated so it was a moot point, anyway; she’d make new friends in the city.

The city that she was now going to explore, for the first time, with Quinn Fabray. So things were going phenomenally for her at the moment, just swimmingly.

“Oh.” Quinn turned back to her book. The e-reader glowed a little, a sure sign of what was to come if she kept it on past the sunset. Rachel could practically see it stinging behind her eyelids now, a glowing rectangle seared into her retinas.

“What’re you reading?”

“It’s for class next semester.” Quinn didn’t take her eyes off the book. “They haven’t changed the curriculum in years, so I asked one of the senior Cheerios, and now I’m getting ahead.”

“Oh.” Rachel ignored the slight and very irritating twinge in her chest. Was train-sickness a thing? She decided that it was. If nothing else it couldn’t be jealousy, because that would be ridiculous, because here was Quinn Fabray on a train next to her and as much as the track could only go one way, neither of them were really bound for the same place. Not emotionally, not in the grand scheme of things. “You might want to turn that off, though, once it gets dark, otherwise your eyesight could start going bad, and you’re one of the better dancers in the Glee Club, so we need you to be able to see.” A pause. Rachel exhaled.

“Thanks?”

“It’s just true, objectively. We need you.” Rachel ignored the way her own legs were all but quivering, her left foot going thip-thip-thip on the carpeted train floor. What else was buried within this carpet? She absolutely did not want to find out.

“I’ll angle it away from you.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about.” It was, partially. Rachel just didn’t say that. “The other passengers might get mad at you, is all, and then we’d be up against people we’re meant to share space with for…” and here she checked her watch, mostly for dramatic effect, considering how she’d been counting the time in her head since they’d left, “...three and a half more hours.”

“How considerate.” There was a way that Quinn talked, when she was being sarcastic, where her words lulled out of her like an unfurling rug, like she was relishing each syllable, and it made Rachel feel some sort of way, a way that she should not have been feeling at all for her possible rival/possible friend/possible ???, especially not while they were trapped together in such close quarters.

Not for the first time, Rachel cursed the gossipy nature of William McKinley High School. Who even cared that she was going on a trip during winter break? Less than a year ago nobody had known who she was at all.

But for whatever reason, the information had made its way to Quinn, and now here they both were, on this train with no end in sight.

Well. There was an end in sight. In theory. But Rachel thought that three and a half hours might as well have been an entire lifetime, or a few seconds, or whatever strange and stranger still means of time-measurement things took on when she was with Quinn.

“I’ll turn it off. Geez. You don’t give up, do you?” Quinn clicked a button on the e-reader and tucked it away in her bag.

“Not really, no. You don’t get anywhere if you give up.”

“Great advice.” There it was again, that languid manner, that drawl. Rachel didn’t think it was fair that a voice could be so attractive. “You should put that on a motivational poster.” And then she bunched up her jacket, propped it against her head, turned towards the window, and presumably went to sleep.

Presumably, because Rachel couldn’t see her face, but she could see the way Quinn’s body relaxed a little, and there was the jacket-pillow thing. So there was that.

Maybe now, she thought, she would finally be able to recharge the iPod.

***

Quinn slept fitfully, as she so often did. Sleep had never been a thing that came easily to her, and while the endless routine of high school had instilled something of a regular schedule into her, she still hated sleeping on transit.

So she drifted in and out, occasionally hearing someone yell at their partner or coworker over the phone a whiles away while Rachel kept her gaze fixed on the window, beyond her, beyond most anything else.

This continued even after the sun had gone down, when Quinn couldn’t make anything out beyond the occasional strip-mall neon signs. She wondered briefly if Rachel ever slept. She decided that she probably didn’t.

The truth was, she didn’t have much of a plan in terms of why she was going with Rachel over the break. It was an impulse move, and she’d been doing more and more of those lately. It was stupid and a waste of money.

She’d been looking forward to it for the past five days.

In any case, it would only be for a few days, and then they would be back on the train and bus and train and bus again, back in their allotted positions. For now, though - for now and only for a little while longer - for now, she could do and be anything she wanted. Anyone would’ve been tempted by that.

Right?

***

The train wailed into the station and Rachel stood up with the very distinct feeling that most of her limbs had been replaced with intensely low-quality plastic. Everything creaked.

“Ow,” she said, out loud, but it was swallowed in the cacophony that was an entire train of people hurrying to leave said train. Quinn stood up next to her.

“You should stretch,” she said. Rachel blinked.

“Hmm?” Maybe she was a tad sleep-deprived. Someone had to be awake on the train. Otherwise what was the point of having a buddy system to begin with? Without her, their things and money would have probably been stolen already and they’d have needed to hitchhike all the way back to Lima, sitting in the backs of strange trucks and watching the stars and…

Well. She’d stayed awake. So that was what mattered. Not the hypotheticals.

“So that you’re not sore for the next ride,” Quinn explained, herself doing some limber thing that Rachel very politely averted her eyes from. There was no reason for her to torment herself any more than she already was, no reason at all for her to look at Quinn while she un-plasticked her own limbs.

Rachel tried to repeat the motions anyway, because of course she did, because she wasn’t as infallible as she’d have liked everyone to believe.

“The bus is outside the station,” she said after about thirty seconds of feeling very stupid and also feeling like Quinn was just…looking at her. She didn’t know why. She didn’t think it’d be fair to ask. “I’ve mapped out an itinerary for us for the duration of the journey, and we have about twenty minutes to head to the food court before we need to get in line for the bus.”

“Don’t go buck-wild, now,” Quinn muttered, leading the way out of the train anyway. Rachel trailed behind her and tried very hard not to think about how or why she was the one following Quinn when she had been the one to come up with this entire idea.

***

Quinn didn’t leave home that often - she didn’t have any excuse to, and Yale didn’t appreciate slackers, which meant most of her spare time was taken up by homework and Glee Club - but it wasn’t like she never watched movies. She knew, rationally, that train stations were big.

Somehow this didn’t really prepare her for the actual experience of being in a train station where, it seemed, nothing ever stopped.

Rachel took the lead again, and Quinn let her. She also didn’t say anything when Rachel took her hand and maneuvered them through the throngs of people, all of them talking, all of them going somewhere.

It sure was a way to make a girl feel stagnant, she thought. Then she banished that thought. Then she thought about Rachel’s hand, snug around her own, and everything else very quickly ceased to matter.

“Pretty warm in here, for winter,” Quinn said, in an attempt to make conversation. She wasn’t going to antagonize her ride.

“It's climate change. If it snows while we’re here, I’m planning on taking as many photos as I can, in case it never snows again.” Rachel didn’t look at her while she talked, just kept moving and moving. She looked at home here, Quinn thought, among the thick scarves and the click-clack of a thousand fast-moving expensive shoes, her hair swishing back and forth as she speedwalked.

“Cheery.” Quinn had no idea where they were going, and thought that her life really had gone off the knocker if she was trusting Rachel Berry with…well, with everything, really. Other than the duffel bag, which she hadn’t let go of since arriving on the doorstep. She’d memorized its contents the night before leaving.

She wouldn’t have been able to tell you why.

“Dammit,” Rachel hissed, coming to a screeching halt in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts with a line winding around and reaching through to the main area. Quinn nearly bumped into her. It’d never been a conscious thing she’d been aware of, how rarely Rachel swore, but the sound was surprising anyway, like a puppy showing a singular pointed fang that could tear into you if it really, truly wanted to.

Quinn wasn’t going to be bitten.

“They’re short-staffed, genius. Did your entire plan hinge on a train station snack stop?”

“Quiet. I’m thinking.” Like a detective, or a statue, Rachel raised her thumb and pointer finger to her chin, crouching down a little. It would’ve been endearing if they hadn’t been in the middle of a train station.

“I don’t think you have to worry about missing the train,” Quinn said, then, looking at the massive television in the center of it all. “They’re doing repairs. It’s delayed at least an hour.”

“Oh. Great. Wonderful.” Rachel punctuated each word like she was spitting it out. Quinn looked around the space, briefly, trying to see if maybe there were any benches. There weren’t. Everything, everywhere, was occupied. It only occurred to Quinn then, just an hour and a half away from their destination and so very close to never needing to talk about this again, that they were together, in public. Holding hands. Looking for all the world like a pair of absurdly well-dressed teen lovers.

Quinn didn’t know what to do with that, the anonymity, the publicity, the ungodly paradox that was her and Rachel standing in the middle of a train station together.

“Our hotel reservations are for eleven on the dot,” Rachel murmured, her voice hollowed out.

“Reschedule them, then.” At least something could be solved, here. Quinn was still reeling from the whole they could be a couple in public here thing. Not that she’d ever say that to Rachel’s face.

“It’s not that simple, Quinn.” Somehow, without either of them noticing, Rachel had inched a little closer. Quinn could feel her own heartbeat thumping among everything else (all that noise) and she thought that if Rachel came any closer to her then she’d be able to hear hers, too.

And what would she be able to do with that? It wasn’t the kind of thing she was dying to find out.

“Okay,” Rachel said, largely to herself. “This is fine. We have all of this under control, and in a few hours we’ll be able to laugh about it and say, oh, remember when we were waiting for the train at nine in the morning? There’s a small newspaper shop that sells candy and things. We can camp out there until the train arrives.”

“Sure.” Quinn recognized this side of Rachel - scheming, uncompromising, a little scary. Usually it was reserved for when she didn’t get a solo. In any case, it was the kind of mode best left…untampered with.

Or so Quinn decided, in order to preserve herself, because she was selfish when she came down to it.

***

Rachel flipped through a paperback as Quinn sat on her duffel bag, both of them bored, neither of them talking much.

Which was, of course, fine by Rachel. She was fairly certain the two of them weren’t supposed to be here, wedged as they were between the aisles of books, the shelves towering over them from their positions on the floor. Quinn had her legs folded neatly beneath her, the image of someone who’d needed to make herself smaller once upon a time, who still knew how to do it.

Similarities. You could find them in anyone if you tried hard enough. That was how Rachel rationalized the thought, the knowledge that they’d both chosen to end up here, that they both knew how to do…that.

The book was terrible. Rachel didn’t know why anyone would shell out two dollars for it, let alone fifteen, but maybe some people just liked tacky drama without proper buildup. She shoved it back into the shelf, parting the two other copies it’d been between, careful not to wrinkle any of them. The book might’ve been bad, but she wasn’t an animal. And she didn’t want it on her conscience.

Quinn just sat there, staring at nothing, nearly catatonic, but she looked more comfortable than Rachel felt, propped up on the duffel bag like a little queen, still taller even with her legs folded under her.

Rachel resisted the urge to ask if she could borrow a pillow or something from in there, even though her back was steadily feeling worse as she leaned on a bookshelf for support and she feared that by the time the train arrived she would have irreparable damage done to her bones.

Her pride would get the best of her someday. She knew that as certainly as she knew Quinn was sitting two feet away from her, as certainly as she knew her own breath. As a rule, she tried not to let that bother her. Everyone had their moral failings; if her own was to be too self-loving, too talented and unrelenting, then that really wasn’t the worst lot she could be thrown, was it?

In any case, she wasn’t about to start reading another tome of trash, so she turned to Quinn.

“Why did you agree to do this, anyway? This isn’t some kind of elaborate spying plan for Coach Sylvester, is it? Because if it is, I don’t have any qualms about leaving you here.” This was a lie, of course it was a lie; Rachel wouldn’t leave her behind for anything.

(Mostly anything. There were exceptions, as there were to everything, and hers came in the form of an unexpected but entirely deserved surprise audition for the next national sensation, but they were one city away from that sort of thing anyway.)

“I think it’s a little late for that,” Quinn said, shifting forward a little so that she used the duffel bag as a back support. It looked soft. Softer still would be Quinn herself, but Rachel saw no point at all in going down that particular rabbit hole. “Having been a part of the Glee Club for over a year now. I could’ve just quit right before Sectionals if I wanted to mess with you all.”

“Of course. Of course.” Rachel paused. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“And I suppose it’d be a moot point to ask you the same thing?” Quinn folded her arms across her chest. Rachel had seen Santana and Brittany do the same thing, with the same way of gripping the opposite arm when they did it. She wondered if it was a habit all of them picked up at some point or another during their time as Cheerios, a residual thing from some move, or if there was some quality that drew people who crossed their arms across their chest to the team. The chicken or the egg. Rachel wracked her brain for a moment when Kurt had made the motion.

All of these thoughts, of course, happened in the span of about two seconds, because Rachel answered more or less immediately with, “because I want to live there.”

“You won’t find an apartment in one weekend.”

“Not now. I have to finish high school first. But for the future, it’d be…nice. And it’s part of my life plan. So having some kind of mental picture for how to actually accomplish that, being able to picture myself in that space?” Rachel shrugged. “It’s important.”

“Oh.” Quinn didn’t say anything else.

“And look at you, dodging the question again. Do you have someone hidden in the city?” Rachel waggled her eyebrows - this was what people called “girl talk,” this gossiping, and she tried her very best to ignore how it seemed to pull the string around her heart taut and tense. She’d have to get good at this sort of thing anyway, with her new and impressive group of cosmopolitan friends she could just about picture when she put her mind to it.

But then again, maybe they’d let her talk about girls without making a big thing about it. She didn’t know.

There were a lot of things she didn’t know, and that knowledge scared her somewhat.

***

Quinn didn’t answer.

Mostly because she didn’t want to tell Rachel that it was because she’d wanted to spend time with her. That was one of those things she had to keep close to her heart, guard it like hell. There seemed to be more and more of those, lately.

And because she didn’t want that interest in Rachel’s expression to change. And was there really anything so wrong with that? Quinn felt herself drawn to the floor, however she’d have liked to not feel that. The floor wouldn’t give her away, she knew that much.

But there was only so much to look at, when it came to the floor, only so much to consider. Quinn thought - not for the first time and definitely not for the last - about how close she was to Rachel in that moment, how easy it would be for her to just lean over and…

“Have you read this one?” Rachel tossed her a book. Quinn - years of reflexes be damned apparently - fumbled to catch it, winced when she dog-eared a page by accident.

“No.”

“It’s not worth your time.” Yet she’d taken it out of the shelf. Rachel Berry - a girl wrapped in mysteries, when she wasn’t singing her intent directly to the subject of her ire, or joy, or whatever.

Quinn wouldn’t admit that just once, she wanted to be the one Rachel sang to.

“This isn’t exactly the place to nap, is it?” she asked, rhetorically, because she was good at redirecting questions. Why’d you get kicked out of the Cheerios? None of your business, maybe you should think more about why you’re not in them. Why do you keep looking at her like that? Why do you notice?

(That second one was courtesy of Santana, who, infuriatingly, knew everything)

“No.” Rachel looked out at the schedule again, as if it’d changed again in the two minutes since she’d last looked at it. “I’m surprised at how calmly you’re handling this. I’d think that this would be anyone’s nightmare, waiting and never knowing when you’re meant to get on a train. We could get left behind!”

“There are worse places to be stranded than Philadelphia,” Quinn retorted, because what if she didn’t mind these few spare minutes? This was one of those things she should by all means be enjoying if she was being honest with herself, which she often wasn’t.

It was so hard for her to be honest with herself.

“I guess. But I had to leave my credit card at home - too much of a liability apparently - and I don’t know if the cash could net us a stay at a place that won’t be dangerous, do you?”

“I don’t.” Quinn started to pick at a hangnail, sharp, methodical. She didn’t need to - she’d never felt the need to fidget, always had too easy of a time staying still, stark in contrast to Rachel’s near-constant movements - but the sensation kept her grounded. And nobody was there to nitpick her about it. So there was that.

“So you understand my fears.” Rachel tipped herself forward, just a little bit, just enough for Quinn’s breath to catch in her throat.

“They’ll call us.” Quinn didn’t move. How did they both end up in this situation all the time? A breath away from changing everything, but they never did. Sometimes Quinn felt like she was trapped in amber. Frozen in time. “For the train.”

“Or they won’t.” Rachel said it simply, almost resigned to a life of living in a train station forever. Was this what she dreamed of? Quinn knew - had always known - that Rachel wanted something beyond what Lima could offer, that she’d leave everyone behind as soon as she could. And for a long time that hadn’t bothered her, because why would it?

Things were always a lot simpler in one’s head.

“I’ve missed this.”

“What?”

“Us.” Quinn fumbled for something else to add to that. “Sniping at each other. Almost like old times, right?”

“You used to throw slushies in my face and insult me, openly, and nobody did a single thing about it mostly because they were probably intimidated by my inability to be affected by such immature pranks. We hated each other. That’s what you call old times?”

“People change.” And how overwhelmingly she had. Quinn felt like she was a pipe close to bursting most days; this little trip had done nothing to aid her in pushing down that feeling. “We did.”

Rachel didn’t say anything in response, which was weird all on its own - if she wasn’t talking, if she wasn’t putting her stream-of-consciousness monologues out into the world, Quinn wasn’t sure what she was doing. Planning on some kind of revenge for the year and a half of torment, probably. There had to be a slushie machine somewhere in this train station.

Quinn wondered if it was normal, for her heart to keep beating like this, fast and steady and scarier than she’d admit. It must’ve been everyone around her.

No other reason. She tugged at her scarf a little, breathed in, breathed out. She could do this. She wasn’t going to let this get to her.

“Let’s play twenty questions,” Rachel said, then, probably just to break up the silence - at least that’s how Quinn chose to interpret it, but she was probably right.

“I’ll bite.” Quinn leaned forward, just a little, imperceptibly so - unless you were particularly perceptive, which she knew Rachel was. Oh, son of a bitch.

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Rachel asked, at the same time Quinn said, “Worst kiss you’ve ever had?”

“Oh,” they both said, then, in unison. Rachel snorted.

“So we’ve got different versions of it, huh?” Quinn raised her eyebrows, playful, trying her best to stop the smile spreading across her face. Oh, she was in deep.

“In middle school,” Rachel blurted out. “This boy I knew in an acting course that I took over the summer. It didn’t mean anything and neither of us knew what we were doing at all so it was really awkward for both of us.” She paused. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Hm.” Quinn said nothing else. Wouldn’t, more like. She didn’t know what she’d do if she spoke.

***

Rachel’s back was officially starting to hurt, badly, but she didn’t say anything about that to Quinn because to do that would be to admit a weakness, and she couldn’t do that. Besides, what could Quinn do about it? It wasn’t like she was going to massage her in the middle of the bestseller aisle in the middle of a newsstand in the middle of 30th Street Station. That’d be ridiculous and as much as she entertained ridiculous fantasies in her spare time, she had no intentions whatsoever to rope Quinn into them.

No, she already had enough on her plate as it was, she could handle this, they’d call the train soon, she had to believe that.

If she didn’t, if she let her emotions get the best of her, she’d probably start to do something like cry here, and how could she let Quinn see that? It’d mess with everything they had, this tentative dynamic that she was almost sometimes comfortable with.

No. No.

“And yours?” There, she thought, she’d toss Quinn’s question back at her and try to push down that weird twinge of jealousy she’d inevitably feel when Quinn bragged of some long-past conquest relegated to anecdotal status.

Was that who she’d become? Was that who Quinn would become, to her? Questions she didn’t want answered under any circumstances, and moot points besides considering how there’d never be a situation where the two of them were kissing anyhow.

“Oh, you don’t want to hear about that.” Quinn closed her eyes, like she was reliving the moment. Rachel wondered what she saw behind those eyelids.

“Maybe I do,” Rachel challenged, because she was nothing if not ornery, if not contrarian to a fault, and she was honestly pretty proud of it.

“Brittany,” Quinn said, and looked triumphant, the day’s catch clutched tight in her teeth. Rachel could do little but gawp.

“Our Brittany?”

“She wasn’t a bad kisser, but seeing her the next day…context is everything. It made things awkward for all of us for a while.”

“Oh.” Rachel licked her own lips, feeling the electricity, feeling like if she didn’t kiss Quinn now-

Well, she didn’t entirely know.

“Your turn.” Quinn put her hands on her knees, waited. Rachel wracked her brain for questions that weren’t too probing and weren’t too vague and came up with nothing. “Wow. Did I finally get Rachel Berry to shut up? Santana owes me five dollars.”

“You were betting on me?!”

“Kind of.” Quinn shrugged. “Not really. It was before we…before I knew you.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I’d hope so.” Quinn never preened, Rachel noticed, and she noticed this because she, of course, was definitely prone to preening when given the opportunity.

Was this one of those instances? Was she delighting in no longer being at the very bottom of things? The thought scared her a little. She was used to climbing without looking down, but this was entirely different.

“There’s our train,” Quinn said, her voice far away. Rachel could hear every lilt in it anyway - she needed to work on her enunciation, and sometimes it’d get nasally if she wasn’t paying attention, but in a non-singing context (of which there were increasingly few; so rarely did she spend time with Quinn outside of school) it was endearing.

And cute, and hot, and all of those other unfortunate adjectives that Rachel thought were best left unspoken for the time being.

“Good.” Rachel stood up, trying her very best to ignore the pins and needles shooting through her legs - such was the reaction, unfortunately banal and human as it was, that anyone would have after sitting on them for this long. She still hadn’t changed the reservations. She didn’t know how.

And she wouldn’t tell Quinn any of that, even though she knew that Quinn could probably see her legs quivering a little while she, infuriatingly, unfolded to her full height like a freaking mountain lion.

It was so easy for Rachel to forget she was shorter than Quinn. It was less obvious, with other girls, than it was with boys - they’d been at eye level moments ago, but now she’d need to tip her head up a little bit to do that, and she didn’t want to do that, and they’d be late for their train at this rate anyway.

“Let’s go,” she said, instead of any of that. “Okay? There might still be some spots in the quiet car.”

“Never would’ve thought you’d want to be in the quiet car.” Quinn followed her anyway, probably workshopping more comebacks in her head as she did so like a comedian mining an experience for the best possible bit. You never shut up, do you want to make all of them hate you? Or, does the sound of everyone else’s voices really bother you that much?

Rachel had learnt, early on in her high school career (about two slushies in if her memory didn’t fail her) that chronic insecurity and an unrelenting belief that one was destined for greatness tended to manifest itself in the strangest ways, which was how she’d started to think up clever little retorts to Quinn’s non-existent snipes.

This continued until they ended up in the actual line and then, once it’d started to move, Quinn looked at her again. Rachel’s heart got caught in her throat and she wondered if it’d affect her singing ability at any point, if this was the blurry line between professionalism and emotion she’d so often tried to stay on one side or the other of.

“You’ll get bored of the quiet car in, like, five minutes,” Quinn said, and then looked ridiculously satisfied with herself.

***

All the quiet car talk ended up being a moot point. It was already full by the time they stepped on - probably because they were halfway up the line - and Rachel had marched herself with Quinn in tow (she had no reservations about personal space, she’d taken Quinn’s hand like it was a luggage handle) through the train and up to the closest empty pair of seats.

“I didn’t want us to get stuck in one of the dining ones,” she explained, after she’d already claimed the window seat and plugged in her iPod, which was, predictably, bedazzled within an inch of its life. Quinn couldn’t do much other than sit next to her and lean closer to the window side when a woman with a baby stroller in front of her squeezed through the narrow aisle.

“They shouldn’t even let baby strollers on here,” she muttered, before she could stop herself.

“Baby strollers.” Rachel watched the woman plow down anyone in her way, the baby presumably sleeping through all of it. Quinn did the same, musing over whether Rachel was thinking about the same thing she was. It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them not to acknowledge what existed, between them - Shelby and Beth, that serendipitous thing, what would that make herself and Rachel? There wasn’t a word for it. Quinn didn’t want there to be.

If she named it, it was real. That went way beyond unexpected adoptions and reappearing biological mothers. That went into the realm of the ordinary, the weird and nebulous love that was nonetheless unaffected by soap opera-esque dramas and was stripped down to her and Rachel and this train car. She stayed tilted at an angle towards Rachel long after the woman and her bulldozer of a baby stroller had gone to some other car.

“They should just call them strollers,” Rachel continued, and Quinn wondered if she’d missed something. “The baby part is redundant; have you ever heard of an adult stroller? But it’s always baby strollers.” She looked at Quinn for confirmation. Quinn shrugged, and the motion felt weird as soon as she did it.

Too casual. Too easy. Like they were friends and not just relying on each other because it was convenient.

The train shook itself awake. Quinn leaned back slightly into her seat. Rachel took a perfectly coiled pair of earbuds from her bag and put them in. The train was loud, the people around louder, but if she strained a little Quinn thought she could hear the opening notes to a big-band musical theater number.

Or maybe she was just filling in the quiet with assumptions. Maybe Rachel was listening to heavy metal. She didn’t know. She probably never would, unless she asked, which she wouldn’t.

Weirdest kiss?

It wasn’t like she could’ve told Rachel the rest of it: Brittany, because they’d both been bored and it was before Brittany and Santana became Brittany-and-Santana and Brittany had smelled like cinnamon toast for some reason (later, she would say it was because she’d woken up thinking that she’d become a slice of cinnamon toast and would soon be eaten, and Quinn would nod politely and still not understand)

It was too bright, outside. Quinn knew that jet lag didn’t apply here - Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York were all in the same time zone - but she still felt like it ought to have been night. She couldn’t have told you why. It just should’ve been.

“I’m going to sleep,” Rachel announced, and turned on her side so that she was facing the window. “The delay wore me out and I want to be fully alert for when we arrive in New York.” Quinn took that as the rejection it was and found herself staring out into nothingness.

Eventually, she got tired of that, and turned to look at Rachel for a few seconds, took her in unguarded - the way her mouth opened, just a little, the way she held the iPod tight in a way that might’ve looked, to someone else, like she was faking, like she was really awake.

Quinn knew that wasn’t true. She knew that Rachel was just like that, that she held things tight even when she didn’t know she was doing it.

***

Grand Central Station, in a succinct summary: unforgettably massive.

30th Street had next to nothing on this one. Rachel still hadn’t rescheduled the hotel reservations (not enough service in the stations, and she wasn’t made of money, she couldn’t very well reschedule on her phone now could she?) and she was bone-tired in a way that defied explanation and Quinn was still there but, despite all of that, she could practically feel the city vibrating above her, beneath her, surrounding her on all sides in a glorious cacophony of being.

Her limbs didn’t fall asleep this time, thankfully, because if they had she’d have needed to do that wobbly little stretch-dance thing to stop them from doing that, and then Quinn would look at her like…like…

It didn’t bear considering.

Like the other ones, in what had started to feel like an unrelenting cycle of trains and buses and so on and so forth, she led Quinn and tried not to think about how someone’s hands could be that tough and that soft at the same time and kept her head held high all the way until the two of them were spit out the mouth of the great beast into the city itself and then she just let herself soak it all in.

“Oh,” she whispered, reverent if she’d ever respected anything besides herself, comforted by the knowledge that her heart was pounding for a reason unrelated to the girl standing next to her and apparently not feeling the history of an entire lifestyle sinking into her bones.

Well. Some things weren’t for everyone.

“It’s definitely not Lima,” Quinn said, and Rachel noticed belatedly that their hands were still intertwined - intertwined, what a word that was, like they were tied, bound, and not easily detachable from each other; for the sake of everything beautiful in the world it wasn’t like someone had sewn their fingers together!

But it was probably better this way, she quickly rationalized, in case either of them got lost. It was perfectly practical to go on like this, and besides if she couldn’t hold hands with a girl in New York then where could she do that? Not that she was holding hands, holding hands, with her. No. Of course not. There was a clear distinction between holding hands and holding hands and she knew exactly which side of it she was on.

Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

“The hotel’s within walking distance,” she said, and turned in the vague direction where she thought it probably was. The website had said it was close to the station. This had been a selling point, for all parties involved, because it meant that she could make a hasty escape if Quinn drove her up the wall, and vice versa, and it was convenient to boot.

“Fantastic,” Quinn said, and she shivered, just a little bit.

“You’re cold?” Call it a ridiculous thought, but somewhere along the line Rachel had just started to assume that Quinn didn’t get cold, or warm for that matter, that she regulated her temperature somehow and that was why she wore that cheerleading uniform every single day, including now, hidden as it was beneath a meshy sweater and a puffy jacket.

“I won’t be if we get moving.”

“Point taken. Remember the landmarks for me while we walk, okay? I’m trying to take it all in but I want to know if we get lost.”

“Aye-aye, captain.” Quinn mock-saluted her, that smirk still on her face, and when had that stopped being something Rachel found threatening? They started walking anyway.

***

The hotel was middle-of-the-road, Quinn decided, once she and Rachel had checked in (the concierge hadn’t cared that they were twenty minutes late; nobody did) and dumped their stuff on their respective beds and looked around. Not the fanciest (not the kind of place Coach Sylvester usually arranged for away meets) but not likely to get them murdered, either.

Quinn was fine with this. Rachel was still checking underneath the beds for razor blades half an hour in.

“They probably wouldn’t even get up this far,” Quinn noted, sitting on the bed Rachel had deemed officially blade-less minutes before, the clicking of her e-reader the only sound in the room beyond the humming air conditioner and the occasional rustle of sheets. This would, she knew, now be her bed, for the next few days at least. It was closer to the door and the heater, so she was fine with this. “The razor-blade murderers? They’d have to climb ten stories just to sneak something under your pillow.”

“You never know,” Rachel said, with an authority in her voice that was honestly kind of impressive considering the absurdity of her claims. Quinn clicked through the author’s note and acknowledgements and the summary of the book she’d just read and clicked out of it. No use starting a new one now, she figured. Her own itinerary was fairly short - look at some college campuses, go to the park, maybe lie and tell Rachel she wanted to see the Stonewall Inn to support Kurt.

Rachel’s was probably planned to the letter. Somewhere in her bright checkered roller bag there had to be one of those calendars where you could pencil dates in, plan by the hour. Was this on it? Arrive, check for razor blades.

Quinn leaned back a little and looked at the ceiling.

“The fan’s broken,” she said, watching one of the propellers droop and lag behind the rest of it. She didn’t even know why a ceiling fan would be running in the winter, but it wasn’t her place to question it.

“All clear here,” Rachel said, like she hadn’t heard her, and maybe she hadn’t. Quinn tried not to let this bother her. “And it doesn’t matter much - we’re not going to spend very much time here; I found some websites where people resold Broadway tickets for cheap and for the ones I couldn’t get from those I think I can probably convince the ticket-takers that I’m actually the talent and need to enter through the front way for posterity.”

It was such a quintessentially Rachel thing that Quinn found herself laughing a little.

“Really. You’re just going to lie to them?”

“It’ll be good practice.” Satisfied with her fruitless search for hidden razor blades, Rachel started pulling things out of her suitcase, a flurry of bright sweaters and socks, too fast for Quinn to catch sight of any one thing. Rachel could have brought two shirts or a hundred.

Back home, right now, her friends were probably lounging, still enjoying the break enough to stay in bed until noon at least. Santana was sleeping over at Brittany’s house and dangling pieces of jewelry in front of Lord Tubbington when he stepped on her face.

But here she was, with Rachel Berry, fully of her own accord, and there wasn’t much she could do to explain that away.

***

If she’d gone with anyone else, Rachel knew full well that she’d forget they were there every five seconds. She was in love with the city and in love with how easily she could picture herself living there and wished she could be swept up in it fully.

But she wasn’t, because Quinn was still here, and she was glad to have someone else with her here - really, she was! - but it was just too much, the way she’d look at her, not pitying or mean or anything else, just herself. Just Quinn, neutral, walking in time with her.

It was going to snow. Not as much as it had last year on the East Coast, but still some, in a few days, though it was also supposed to melt by the afternoon. Rachel decided she’d park herself on the little rickety balcony and watch it when it happened.

For now, the air was cold and dry and the two of them were just walking through it, Rachel en route to the first of many tourist attractions she wanted to get out of the way before getting into the real stuff, Quinn saying they should go to the park afterwards, Rachel scratching out Rockefeller Plaza in turn for the sake of the park, Rachel knowing she wouldn’t have changed her plans for anyone else, Rachel trying not to consider the ramifications of that.

She was getting very good at these sorts of things. It would serve her well in the industry. This was a small comfort and yet it was also one she clung to very tightly, because to do otherwise would be to confront the actual truths of what she was feeling, and that was…well, that was something else.

Quinn, for her part, was looking at some unknowable thing in the distance. Rachel asked her what she was looking for a few times, but she’d just shrug and the motion would look a little awkward, like she’d just learned how to do it, and then they’d keep walking, so she learned not to ask.

This changed once they reached the park (dried and wintry as it was) and Quinn took the lead, then, and it took absolutely everything in Rachel’s body not to immediately cut in front of her.

“Why here?” she asked, once they’d both been walking for a little while. Someone played a saxophone somewhere in the distance. Rachel hoped their lips wouldn’t stick to the instrument; that wouldn’t go over well for anybody. Quinn paused, angled herself towards the sound of the saxophone.

“People aren’t so guarded here.” Quinn took a deep breath. Rachel felt like something very important was happening and she didn’t really know what it was and she hated not knowing more than most things. “I wouldn’t mind living here, later. If I went to college here. That’s part of why I’m going with you on this trip-”

“-and we’ll visit them, believe me, I’ve already booked a campus tour of NYADA even though they’re still on winter break too so a lot of the buildings will probably be empty and it won’t really be like when classes are in session-”

“-but more than that, it’s just…different.” Quinn balled her gloved hand into a fist, the motion softened a little by the glove, so that her fingers weren’t tucked all the way into her palm. “Nobody knows me here.” The newsstand, the clerk, you girls have fun now. “Nobody knows who I’m supposed to be. That’s the appeal of anywhere else, but it’s more obvious here. I don’t have to be in a massive city to be invisible. As long as I’m in a place like this…”

“I’d know you,” Rachel said, before she could stop herself. Quinn’s hands uncurled. Rachel twitched. Nobody spared them a second glance and for once that was entirely fine and wasn’t that weird?

Rachel sidestepped her, neatly, like she was trying to get out of the way of some invisible and particularly rude passerby. Where had that come from? What was she doing, trying to make this more than a trip of convenience? The train had been trouble enough, she didn’t have any reason to drag things on like this when she was supposed to be putting together a mental picture of her future, and that was something that wouldn’t- couldn’t have Quinn Fabray in it.

“Well,” she said, then, abruptly. “We should get going, right?”

“What’s the rush?”

“I still have two more destinations to hit before the sun goes down.” This wasn’t entirely truthful - Rachel had allotted space in her itinerary for spending more time than expected in a place, largely because she knew that there’d be quite a lot of opportunities for her to gawk and daydream and perhaps break into a musical number if the mood demanded it - but she also felt that if she didn’t leave right this second she would implode, or at least do something very stupid.

Even thinking that run-on thought wore her down.

“And the park will be here later,” she added, even though Quinn didn’t look that affected one way or another. Maybe that whole speech had just been for show. Rachel wouldn’t put it past her. They were both good at this, when it came down to it - hiding intentions behind layers and layers of…other layers.

“Why do I feel like you’re trying to leave me here?” Quinn tilted her head to the side, and her ponytail moved with her.

“And let your untimely doom weigh down my conscience? Absolutely not.” Rachel stepped ahead, then - always the place where she felt most comfortable, taking the lead - and walked through the winding place, and didn’t miss the way Quinn stopped by the old saxophonist and dropped a dollar in his instrument case.

***

“I’ve been thinking it over, and we should really try to get more of the band kids to help out with the Glee Club.” Rachel chattered along as the sun began to sink into the sky, building lights flickering on around them. Maybe they’d always been on, Quinn thought. Maybe she was just noticing it now. “We have Brad the pianist - he’s a lovely little man, you know, even though I’ve never heard him talk and don’t really know how he’s always there - but can you imagine what our performances would sound like with full instrumentation?”

“Is this because of the guy in the park?” Quinn glanced down at her and Rachel’s feet, walking in tandem, Rachel’s Mary Janes click-clacking on the pavement like she would start tap-dancing at any moment. “You’re threatened by him?”

“Of course not.” Rachel didn’t look at her. Quinn didn’t stop looking at her. She knew Rachel could sense it; knew that she had a sort of sixth sense for whenever someone was giving her attention. “I’m not! It’s just that as capable as I am of a capella and prefer it when my voice is front and center, we should still consider it. I mean, Broadway shows have full orchestration, with the pits and everything? And I think Vocal Adrenaline has something like that lined up too. If we at least considered it, there could be something really special.”

“And you’re the we in this scenario.”

“Of course. As unofficial co-president of the Glee Club and one of only maybe three people in that group with taste, it falls to me to make the creative decisions going forward.” Rachel paused, considering something, and stopped in her tracks as she did so. Quinn nearly walked past her, getting a few steps ahead.

“Does Mr. Schue count as one of those people with taste?” she called over her shoulder, having no idea where she was going and yet relishing the cold wind in her hair.

“You’re not going to ask about yourself?” Rachel hurried to keep pace with her. “I would’ve. That would’ve been the first question out of my mouth - where I am on that list.”

“Maybe I’m tired of lists.” Quinn was honestly a little surprised when Rachel didn’t gasp out loud at that. All she did was catch up, falling back into step so much more easily than Quinn would’ve liked. It would be easier, she thought, to do this with someone she hated. Someone she could actually want to stay away from. Instead she kept dropping these pointless, dramatic things that wouldn’t lead her anywhere.

Her future wasn’t one of glittering cities and her name in lights. She’d never wanted it to be. All she wanted was something else, undefined as that was, something beyond McKinley and Lima and all the rest.

“You keep on bringing up these cryptic tidbits,” Rachel said, as if she’d read Quinn’s mind. Would that be the most surprising thing? She’d certainly inferred enough. “Is there something you want to tell me?” She glanced around, furtive, at the countless people walking home from work, walking to clubs and restaurants, absolutely none of them paying attention to two teenagers stepping in time with each other. Why would they?

“Who are you looking for?”

“Oh, I’m trying to see if this is a good place for a moment like this.” Rachel shrugged, like this was obvious. “Well, then. Out with it. I wasn’t really expecting us to bond until at least the second day of the trip, but if you’re going to say something…”

“It’s nothing.” It wasn’t. I’d know you. Quinn felt a shiver rising from her legs, the cold still biting at her, and she pushed it back. No use showing that to Rachel. No use showing any weakness.

“If you say so. But this is a pretty opportune spot - look at the sunset! I’d remember it forever, if something important happened to me here.”

“Sure, Rachel.” Quinn didn’t think about how the two syllables felt on her tongue, how rarely she’d just said her name. How many barbs had she hidden it beneath? How many times had she let insults roll out like they were nothing? Rachel had hardly ever reacted to any of it, and that had rankled her more than anything, and even now she felt something weird at the thought.

Rachel Berry, the impenetrable. At least that was the front she’d put up. Who was to say any of it was true?

In any case, those days were behind them, the Glee Club forging something that was - if not friendship - at least a truce, and the Quinn of yesteryear would never have pictured going to the store with Rachel, much less to an entirely new city, an entirely different world than the one she just wanted to leave behind.

***

Rachel splurged on room service, the first night, because the energies of the day had made it feel very distinctly like if she went to a restaurant with Quinn it would feel like a date and she just wasn’t in the kind of place where she could handle that right now.

So: room service, cold spaghetti and a burger and a slice of cake that looked like it’d been flipped upside down at some point during the delivery. Quinn flicked through channels on the television, hand wrapped around the remote like it would fly from her grip if she didn’t hold onto it. Rachel tore another salt packet in half and prodded at the food.

In all honesty, they were both just bone-tired - the initial adrenaline (and how she hated the way certain words couldn’t pass through her brain without associations; even at her worst Quinn had never tricked her into thinking she was anything other than what she was, had never tried to apologize only to pelt her with eggs) had worn off. In its place was a sense of exhaustion that Rachel immediately despised.

She’d read somewhere that inadequate sleeping patterns could mess with your voice, and she didn’t remember where she’d read it or if it was true, but she’d always tried to sleep before eleven, had always prioritized her well-being over pretty much everything else. The result was that she did, usually, have energy to spare, that she was usually restless, and so anything to the contrary made her wildly uncomfortable.

Quinn was always tired, Rachel thought, though she’d never voice the thought out loud. There was a weariness in her expression that she’d never been without. Rachel didn’t know what to do about it, or how to make it go away, or if it was even her place to do so, but she noticed, because she noticed everything, because if she missed something then she might miss something important, or so she thought to herself as she watched Quinn watch the television, which had gotten stuck on Ice Age 2 despite her best efforts.

“I’m going to bed,” Quinn announced, leaning back onto the mattress and freeing her hair from its ponytail so that it splayed across the sheets like she was in some photoshoot. Her coat hung in the little closet by the door, and the bright red of the uniform seemed to stand out against the entire room, a beacon, something impossible to look away from. Rachel blinked and it was still there.

“That’s fine.” Rachel finished the last of the spaghetti, the talking mammoths fading into background chatter, into the sound of cars and construction and everything else. Quinn didn’t seem to be planning to get underneath the sheets - she’d already gone still, and Rachel wouldn’t have been surprised if she was already asleep.

For her part, Rachel needed to wash off the grime of the trains, the memories of that morning - had it really only been that morning? - and let it all slip off, away, down the drain…

Quinn was conked out by the time she left the bathroom.

***

Quinn woke up to the sound of a phone jingle, and it wasn’t her phone jingle, and briefly she wondered just where the hell she was until she thought about it for five more seconds and remembered everything else. The train. Rachel. The park. The saxophonist. Rachel again. Invariably she popped into Quinn’s head, and at least part of it had to do with the fact that she was right across the room, still asleep, but there was more to it than that. Quinn knew there was, much as she pretended otherwise.

So she got up, used all of her willpower not to shut off the little flip phone that would not shut up, and took a deep breath. Winter break. This was supposed to be fun, so it would be. As simple as that.

Right?

***

Rachel delighted in the thought of going to Greenwich Village (though, if you asked her why, she’d say it was for reasons of allyship and support, and for no other reason, and she would be very very adamant about that, and then she would try to change the subject) and this didn’t subside at all as the taxi rolled through the streets. She’d had enough of trains, for now, and besides she wanted to see as much as she could.

In moments like this, with the cab smelling very much like cigarettes and Quinn clicking through her e-reader and occasionally glancing out the window beside her, Rachel felt like a plant, like she was photosynthesizing.

“Why’d you pick Stonewall?” she asked Quinn, who bristled at the question.

“No reason.” She paused, a creature caught in headlights, and tried again. “For research.”

“Research?” Rachel leaned forward a little. Weirdest kiss? She could blame the movement on the cab’s errant motions. Quinn held up her e-reader and waved it in Rachel’s face, but the road seemed insistent on delivering their taxi to every single pothole in the city, so she couldn’t read anything of what it said.

“History class. We’re supposed to pick a historical event in the twentieth century, and Kurt mentioned it once, and the teacher’s totally gay, so I figured I’d get points where I could get them.”

“Oh.” In front of them, those little televisions played the daily news. “That reminds me, did you give any thought to the band-kids-Glee-Club alliance thing? I don’t necessarily need support but it’ll go over more smoothly with the rest of the club if at least one other person is supporting it and I probably won’t see anyone else until the end of the break so I thought maybe…”

“It’s a good idea,” Quinn said, listlessly. Rachel started to recognize the signs from tourist guidebooks, knew full well that they were approaching the place itself, tried her best not to react too visibly. “But I don’t know if the band kids will be into it.”

“What do you mean?” The cab rolled to a stop, a stoplight blinking red above them. Rachel had to crane her neck to see it.

“I don’t think they like us that much. I wouldn’t like us, if I wasn’t part of this thing. You’re- we’re self-important, for a club that placed second in regionals. Do you know Brad’s last name?”

“I…no.” Rachel picked at a flap of fake leather on the seat. “Do you?”

“No.” Quinn sighed. “But that proves it, doesn’t it? We’re all self-involved assholes. The band kids wouldn’t want anything to do with us if they knew what was good for them.”

“But we could promise them notoriety.” Maybe she was grasping at straws, maybe she was just trying to cling to this idea that if nothing else had nothing to do with Quinn or a life beyond high school, this fully doable thing she could actually control in some small way. “A place in front of the entire world. I think we’re primed to make it to Nationals this year, you know. Last year there were so many complications-” Rachel cut herself off, looked to Quinn for a reaction.

She didn’t regret staying to watch their competition, knew that Quinn probably hadn’t even noticed her absence, and yet voicing anything that’d happened last year felt wrong, somehow.

“Go on,” Quinn said, eyebrows perfectly arched.

“We’re more of a unit, now. A family in a way that we weren’t before. I think that unity is really coming through in our performances, and having a bigger band to back us could help a lot.” By us, of course, she largely meant herself, but there were some things one couldn’t really say out loud, at least not if you wanted to keep your livelihood and your future career intact.

“Santana’s going to say it’s just to make you sound better.”

“Well, it’s not.” Rachel looked out the window again - the light had turned green, and they were getting closer to their destination - and wondered how much longer this conversation could sustain itself. “If I wanted to make myself sound better, I’d suggest getting rid of instruments altogether, but that’s been done. A capella is more of a college thing, anyway.”

“Mm. Sure.” Quinn had a hand to her mouth, but Rachel caught her laughing anyway, could see her cheekbones stretching her face upwards, and the sight made her feel soft in a way she wasn’t expecting, a way she didn’t really want to be. “We’re here.”

This was a place of great historical relevance to her immediate family and to several of her friends (she did not think about Quinn’s stupidly smooth hands, or her smile, or anything else about her that made Rachel’s heart beat faster, because that was pointless and useless and helped absolutely nobody) and instead of considering any of that she was hoping, ridiculously, for Quinn to agree with her idea, to be impressed by it.

Was this love? It couldn’t be. It had to be. Rachel rationalized that there were many kinds of love, that a rivalry-turned-friendship could absolutely count as a platonic version of said love.

The cab sped away as soon as the pair stepped outside. Less people out, today - it was colder than usual, cold enough that Rachel’s toes were already going numb - but there it was, plain as day: the Stonewall Inn.

“Well, it’s a building,” Quinn said, staring at it anyway. Research. Rachel couldn’t help but feel like there had to be more to it - solidarity with Santana and Brittany, maybe, a strangely touching act of third-wheeling - but then again she didn’t know the machinations of Quinn’s mind. She didn’t know very much at all.

She wanted to, though, more badly than she wanted most things, and she wanted a lot.

“It’s the birthplace of our- their- the community’s struggle for acceptance and liberation!” she snapped, before she could think better of it, hands balled into fists if only to keep the circulation moving in her fingers. Quinn smirked, wryly, and Rachel felt her face flush again. “It’s more than a building.”

“I know.” Quinn trotted forward, coat tailing behind her, almost majestic. The place was locked, and there wasn’t really anything to see of the inside in the daylight. Rachel briefly entertained a fantasy of returning at night, stepping into a world she’d always been on the periphery of, but she and Quinn were too young for it. Neither of them would be convincing adults, she thought - herself with an uncompromising earnestness she was certain dulled with age for most people, and Quinn with her wardrobe still consisting of that singular cheerleading uniform.

Besides, the real-slash-original Stonewall - according to the tourist guide - was actually in the space next to this one, vacant now. Standing at this exterior was the closest they’d get to it.

Quinn didn’t say anything next to her, thoughtful and unmoving. Rachel licked her lips. She winced when they stung with the motion; it was cold enough for them to chap easily, and she’d left her chapstick at home because she’d decided only to pack the essentials.

“What is it?” she asked, quiet, irrationally afraid that if she spoke too loudly she’d spook Quinn away.

“A lot.” Quinn did that arms-crossed motion again, tight, defensive. Rachel noticed that the two of them were right next to each other, back in step together, somehow without even saying it out loud. She felt like she should say something. She felt like she should say something profound, and affirming, and maybe it would lead into a song and maybe it wouldn’t, but nothing came up.

There weren’t words, not really, not ones she could grasp at right now, so she just stood next to Quinn and watched.

***

Quinn wanted to kiss her, then. She wanted to stand in front of the Stonewall Inn and kiss Rachel Berry in front of the whole Village, the whole world, and yet she couldn’t make her body move to do the deed.

But her hand moved of its own accord, and it held Rachel’s, and it felt like a revelation.

***

Rachel had tickets to The Addams Family, among others, pressed between the pages of the itinerary, that thing with which she’d slowly grown more and more weary as this trip progressed. What did that say about her, as a person? If she was considering letting Quinn take the lead, if she wasn’t following this thing she had painstakingly put together to the letter? Were her morals that shakeable? Was she that flimsy of a person? She didn’t want any of that to be true. She wanted to be like a tree, firm, unrelenting.

But then again, trees didn’t get to go anywhere, so maybe that wasn’t the best metaphor. She thought it’d be pretty boring to stay in the same place forever - certainly it wasn’t what she wanted for herself, and it wasn’t what she wanted for Quinn, either. Quinn, who could’ve ditched her at any moment, who stared at the Stonewall Inn with so much reverence in her expression, who seemed to understand herself in a way that even Rachel hadn’t fully reached yet.

Both of them, she felt, were becoming bigger than themselves, and it felt strange and exciting and terrifying all at once.

“Going to lie your way into this one?” Quinn asked, hands folded behind her back like a high-society lady. She certainly could pass for it, glamorous as she was. Rachel’s heart beat faster.

“I could,” she shot back. “Lying is just acting with a bigger audience. Or a smaller one, depending on the lie. But I don’t need to, because I managed to find the tickets for a reasonable price, so the lying will have to wait for another day.”

“Ah, goodie.” Quinn rolled back her shoulders. Rachel did the same. They were, both of them, nothing if not young women certain of how much they deserved their place in the world, unafraid to take up space, and Rachel felt very powerful in a strange way.

***

Musical theater had always been more of Rachel and Kurt’s thing; Quinn preferred the things she could identify from the radio, and of course there was the voice of Coach Sylvester in her head dismissing the whole bunch of toe-tapping, homoerotically charged circus sideshows.

But she was sitting in a theatre, next to the most theater kid-esque theater kid who ever lived, so there was that to contend with. Some things changed.

“I’m going to try and get my playbill signed afterwards,” Rachel stage-whispered as the crowd shuffled around, which Quinn figured was appropriate for the setting. She was, of course, so very loud, even when she pretended not to be. “It’ll be good practice for when I’m signing people’s playbills.”

“You signed the whiteboard two weeks ago.”

“Yes, and Mr. Schue will rue the day he erased it and undid a potentially valuable artifact.” Rachel tapped her playbill - the thing she was getting signed, apparently - against her leg, impatient. Quinn had put hers in her bag without much of a second thought.

“It’ll start soon.”

“I know. It’s just- the anticipation, it gets me every time. You understand, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well. You will.” Rachel smiled, clearly satisfied with herself, and Quinn found herself not at all infuriated and actually kind of…endeared. Which was unfortunate. Because she didn’t want to be. And yet…

Well, she had her feelings to contend with. Feelings which were becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Quinn inhaled sharply and exhaled sharply and repeated this until the curtains came up and she could lose herself in the music.

***

Oh, she knew how much of a cliché it was, she did, but Rachel felt like she was floating on a cloud, like she’d had access to something new and beautiful, and if Quinn had to listen to it then she had to listen to it.

Also it was raining and it was dark and there were several dozen theater kids of approximately the same excitement level all jostling each other like animals to get a glimpse of the stars, and Rachel felt that if she didn’t continue talking to Quinn she might actually bite someone.

(It had happened before, and it would happen again if she wasn’t careful)

“And the production values were just the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen, I know we have a limited budget but maybe we go with my other idea about the instrumentation and that could help with some of it…”

“Sure.” Quinn held her own playbill over her head in an attempt to keep dry - not a particularly good attempt, Rachel thought, considering the fact that the playbills were still paper and the rain was picking up, but a valiant one - and only made eye contact a little bit, looking around like she was trying to find something. Rachel had no idea what - it wasn’t like she knew anyone who lived here; neither of them did.

I’d know you. Rachel wanted to pinch herself.

“There they are!” someone yelled, pointing at the stage door creaking open, a few actors stepping out. And everything else seemed to gently drift away in light of these people she could, eventually, be - that she would, eventually, be, even (especially?) if it meant leaving behind Quinn and everyone else, and just when had Quinn become the first person she thought of? All of it was jumbled together, she decided, because she was having an epiphany here and how many other opportunities would she have to see these people in the flesh?

Many opportunities, if everything went according to plan, but she had no idea if it would.

***

They returned to the hotel sopping wet, but Rachel seemed unbothered.

“How many more of those?” Quinn asked, peeling off her coat as Rachel toweled her hair, having refused to use the little magazines to cover herself and instead standing in the rain for half an hour like some kind of masochist. Quinn certainly wouldn’t be the one with a cold tomorrow, she could say that much.

“Not many. Tickets are still expensive, you know.” Rachel got up and carried the towel back to the bathroom. “It’s just the proximity to everything that makes it special in the first place.”

“Of course,” Quinn drawled, still not totally getting it. She had the sinking suspicion that she never would. This was fine, generally. She knew enough about showtunes to get by in Glee Club, to carry on a conversation with Kurt, and not much more.

“Someday it’ll be me out there.” Rachel returned, sans towel, and sat on her bed, closing her eyes. Quinn had zero doubts that she was picturing it, her future fame, her name in lights. She could see it, too, if she was honest.

She didn’t try to think too much about her own place in that.

“You’d better invest in an umbrella, then.” Quinn figured that if they were better friends - if they were friends at all; she still really didn’t know - she’d nudge Rachel, playful, easy. The way she did with Santana and Brittany, sometimes, those rare nights after Cheerios practice when it was just the three of them. Quinn was definitely an intruder, a third wheel, every time that happened, but they hadn’t uninvited her and she hadn’t brought it up.

“It’s a small price to pay for an opportunity to interact with adoring fans.” Rachel sat up a little straighter, and a few errant raindrops flew out with the motion. She had her gaze set on some unknowable future, and Quinn likely wasn’t a part of it at all. And she was fine with that. She was.

But Rachel, unfortunately, looked ridiculously pretty, prettier than anyone ought to be after monologuing about their inevitable fame while drenched in New York rainwater, which Quinn thought was probably worse than normal rainwater, somehow. She wouldn’t be able to tell you why.

***

Sleep didn’t come as easy, that second night, to either of them. Rachel imagined that it had something to do with the adrenaline buzzing in her veins, the untamperable (was that a word? it should be) sense that she had to be doing something right now right this second or else she was wasting time. And she was not the kind of person to overexert herself, not since the laryngitis incident, but her molecules were humming, telling her she needed to sing, practice, dance, something, as soon as she could.

So of course she wasn’t just going to doze off.

And Quinn, across the room as she was, didn’t seem to be faring that much better. She didn’t move much, but Rachel could tell she was still awake.

“Hey,” Rachel whispered, after some period of them both trying and failing to sleep. Time always got fuzzy at night, and the little digital clock on the bedside table was permanently stuck at 3:07. It gave her a headache to look at it anyway.

“What?” Quinn rolled over, a weirdly elegant motion, even though she ended up wrapping some of her blanket around her body with it. She’d be caught in a blanket burrito by morning if she wasn’t careful. The thought made Rachel chuckle a little.

“You can’t sleep either?”

“No.” Quinn frowned, or at least Rachel thought she frowned. It was hard to tell, without any light, but Rachel could make out the vaguest of shapes in the dark, a Quinn-shaped thing, moving like she was frowning.

“You liked it.” If the lights had still been on and Rachel had been more confident in her depth perception, she’d have tapped Quinn on the forehead, smug and wry, but as it was if she’d tried to do that now she’d probably miss her entirely, or poke out an eye.

“So what if I did? I’m not going to start dancing onstage in tap shoes in my spare time.” Quinn was eerily still, right then. Rachel worried that she’d disappear into the bed entirely if she didn’t keep looking at her.

“Why’d you come with me, Quinn?”

“You needed someone to come with you.”

Because you’re so well-known for the goodness of your heart. “A year ago you would’ve laughed at me needing a chaperone.”

“A year ago I wouldn’t have done any of this.” The blurry shadow of an arm, gesturing around the room. Rachel could barely make it out.

“I guess not.” Rachel breathed in, breathed out, breathed in again. “So what changed?”

“We’re not getting into this tonight.” Quinn rolled back over.

“I’m known for my persistence, Quinn.” Rachel didn’t move, though. She knew her limits, generally, or at least she knew when to push them, and this wasn’t one of those times. “So I’m expecting more of an answer than the cryptic half-things you’ve been giving me all week.”

“Maybe I’ll tell you back in Ohio,” Quinn retorted, muffled by her pillow. “Or, I don’t know. Never.”

“Maybe.” It was what she’d get, for now, and Rachel didn’t mind that as much as she thought she would.

It still didn’t make her sleep any easier, though. She woke up still thinking of interludes and stage doors and rain, so much rain.

***

The end of the trip was fast approaching. There were other things to do over winter break, they both knew this, and the hotel was reasonable, but it wasn’t that reasonable. Quinn knew there was another train ride coming, another bus and another train after that, and then she’d be back home and this would all just be another weird Glee Club memory.

Sometimes she thought she was imagining most of high school. Most of it felt surreal anyway, and if she was imagining it then maybe she was imagining Rachel, too. Maybe she was imagining her two best friends dating each other and fully planning to leave her in the dust at the soonest opportunity.

Currently, however, she and Rachel were back in Central Park, looking very much like a pair of tourists, as the saxophonist played in the very same spot.

“I admire his tenacity,” Rachel said, like he wasn’t right there and couldn’t hear them. Though, he seemed preoccupied enough that maybe he didn’t notice. Quinn just sat and listened, next to Rachel, on a damp bench that probably had some great history she wasn’t aware of. As it stood now it was just kind of wet and gross and probably wasn’t made to hold two people.

“Have you always talked like that?” Quinn asked, once the saxophonist had finished his song and started to take a little break. Rachel turned to her.

“Hmm?”

“I admire his tenacity.” It was not, strictly speaking, the best impression anyone had ever done. Quinn knew this, because there was a covert Rachel Berry Impression competition that happened sometimes, and she’d never won it. “Were you shot out the womb with a thesaurus attached?”

“I like to make sure that people remember the things I say.” Rachel shrugged, somehow making the motion still look formal, tightened, rehearsed. Quinn’s heart beat faster. “Isn’t that what you want? To be remembered?”

“I’d settle on being happy.”

“Well. We want different things, then.”

“Clearly.” Quinn uncrossed and crossed her legs. They were starting to fall asleep. If Rachel noticed the motion, she didn’t say anything, but then again there wasn’t really anything to say. Criticizing completely normal stuff was Quinn’s job.

She was a deeply, deeply shitty person, and she knew this, and she only sometimes made an effort to change it. The frog and the scorpion and so on. It’s in my nature. What was she supposed to do about it? Tell Rachel that her weird little run-on sentences were endearing and that she wanted to see her win the Tony (she’d done her research, she wasn’t stupid, she knew things) and that every time she laughed it was like, it was like, it was…it was like a burst of sunlight and she absolutely had no clue how to handle that?

No. Of course not. There were limits to these things. And besides, what they had now was good. Not perfect, still fragile, still strange, but good. That was about as much as they could ask for, Quinn thought. Good.

The saxophonist started up again, and Rachel bobbed back and forth, just slightly, just enough that nobody would’ve noticed it if they weren’t sitting next to her, if they didn’t feel her shoulder brush against theirs in ¼ time.

***

Rachel did not know how to ice skate, and she refused to give Quinn the satisfaction of skidding around like a pro (because she knew that was how things would turn out, and no she hadn’t asked, but that wasn’t the point, now was it), and yet somehow here they were. Ice skating. On the second-to-last day of their near-pointless trip, no less.

In the interest of fairness (after another performance, the previous night, and another rain-soaked stagedoor and another sleepless period of feeling like she had to, needed to, would do more to get up there) she’d ceded full control of the following day to Quinn, largely because she’d run out of ideas, having been a little bit too efficient with the itinerary, and so it was that they’d gone through everything she’d listed with a day and a half to spare.

Hence: ice skating, a thing she was not good at, and had no experience in, and therefore hated on principle.

“My two gay dads know a lot of lawyers,” she said, lacing up the boots of doom as Quinn stood nearby, waiting. “So if I get injured they could probably sue you, or at least the space.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Quinn’s breath came out in little puffs - the rain had crystalized, and there still wasn’t any snow yet, probably wouldn’t be this time around (and Rachel couldn’t help but picture another weekend, some time in the future, and maybe then she would…) but it was cold enough that she could see her breath. “But nobody’s forcing you to do this.”

“I’ve never been a spectator.” Rachel stood up and immediately regretted it. Whoever had invented this sport - strapping knives to your shoes and then expecting you to just glide around like it was nothing - had been a madman, an enemy, someone who hated her specifically. She sat back down. Quinn noticed.

“Maybe just…stand up? Again?” Infuriatingly, she wavered back and forth like it was nothing. Rachel did, hoping upon hope that maybe she’d somehow prove her wrong (and what she was proving, exactly, well, that was more or less a mystery) and would demonstrate some unparalleled ability in this horrible horrible sport.

This, of course, didn’t happen, because most of her luck had been spent on getting a lead actor’s signature on her playbill.

What happened instead: she skittered around, fearing the icy ground, and grabbed the nearest arm on instinct and then recognized, very quickly, that it belonged to Quinn, and that she should probably let go, so she did, and then she started to flail again and so she reached out and this time someone - Quinn, of course it was Quinn - caught her.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you didn’t know how to do this, were you?” She didn’t move her arm, though, didn’t try to wrench her away to watch her fall on her ass. This, Rachel decided, was progress, but then again she was the one with the train-bus-train directions so maybe it was just a pragmatic reason for wanting her around.

“Have I ever been the type of person to downplay my abilities?” The jacket itself was cold - as was everything else around here - but she could still, somehow, against most odds, feel the warmth of Quinn’s arm through it. Or maybe that was herself, her own body, her own…feelings.

“Hmm, I guess not.” Quinn looked at her again. “I’m going to let go now.”

“Okay.” She could do this. It was just like walking in heels, except the heels were the entire shoe and everything was slippery and terrible, and there were hundreds of people around, poised to watch her fail, and Rachel had never struggled with stage fright but then again she had never been in a position where she could conceivably fail, so there was that.

Quinn let go, tentative, and Rachel immediately grabbed back onto her.

“Okay! Nope! Not doing this!” She thought that she might explode if she kept holding onto Quinn like this, and she knew that there were other tourists who probably thought they were a young couple on vacation - she knew that her dads had enough photos like this hanging around the house, some dorky yet aww-inducing activity they’d tried once for posterity and then never tried again.

It was a good thing they weren’t around anyone either of them knew. Totally invisible, hanging onto each other for dear life. Rachel never liked it when other people were her lifeline.

“How about this, then.” Quinn didn’t say it like a question. She didn’t say many things like a question, come to think of it. Both of them, so self-assured. She moved Rachel’s hand down her arm to fit into her own hand - ridiculously intimate, even more so when she started to move and drag Rachel behind her. “You’ve got to just kick off like you’re running.”

“That’s easier said than done, Quinn. Aren’t there usually lessons for these sorts of things? Activities for beginners?”

“Sure.” Quinn let go, then, and spun around to face her. “But you seem to have the hang of it.” Rachel was surprised to find that she was still on her feet, feeling very much like a spindly-legged baby animal but moving, on the ice, and Quinn was there with her.

“Oh,” she murmured, and then Quinn circled back around and offered her hand again. Rachel took it, and she was the one to push off, this time, Quinn more or less in step with her, the two of them stumbling and strange and yet they were here, and they weren’t always falling, and the crisp air seemed to seep into Rachel’s chest, and she felt like this was what flying must be like.

***

“Your legs are going to hurt like a bitch tomorrow.” Quinn waved a fry in the air on bitch, emphasizing her point, and also admittedly enjoying being able to say the word bitch without someone lurking over her shoulder and hissing language! “I promise you. It’s a good thing we didn’t wait until tomorrow for it. Otherwise you’d probably walk like a cowboy all the way to the train station and we’d miss all of our stops.” She sank back a little into the booth - some fast food place, not a chain but not not a chain, however that worked. America. “Then we’d be stuck here.”

“Wouldn’t that be something.” Rachel looked tired, a little more disheveled than usual, but there was an unmistakable glint in her eyes, something alert. It was how she usually looked, if Quinn was being honest with herself - the girl never stopped, it was frankly both impressive and terrifying - but for whatever reason Quinn noticed it more today, now, as the two of them watched the sun go down, sore, delighted.

This had to be one of those suspended moments in time. Nothing they did here would carry back over to home, to Glee Club, to anything. If it did, they were frankly in a lot of trouble. Quinn didn’t know how to slot herself back into…well, back into herself. And maybe that was sad. Or maybe it was just growing up. Maybe she’d have reached the same weird sense of things if she’d spent this week curled beneath her bedsheets clicking through her e-reader alone.

And it said a lot about herself, she thought, that she didn’t want that.

So now she was here, with Rachel Berry, and she liked being around her and she liked talking with her and she’d liked whatever the hell the skating had been and all the implications behind that, well, they were a lot, and they were extensive and difficult to parse out and all those other lengthy phrases Rachel would use that all boiled down to complicated.

Quinn looked at her as they ordered vegan somethings or other and looked at her as they walked back to the hotel and wondered how long, exactly, it would be before she started something she couldn’t stop.

***

Rachel’s exhaustion was bone-deep, probably from the skating, but it was a nice kind of exhaustion, the weariness that comes with good rehearsal, with giving it your all. So she didn’t mind it too much, not really.

Not that she was going to suddenly shift gears her junior year of high school and become a professional figure skater, of course not, and if she was being honest she probably wouldn’t ever touch the ice again if she could help it, but it had been…well, it had been fun. And Quinn’s expression when she’d let go and looked right at her, like they were dance partners, like they were both in on the joke…

Rachel was a little far gone, at this point, romantically speaking. She knew this, because it didn’t do to repress things, but what was she going to do about it? Quinn was right there next to her! Quinn was watching another Ice Age movie (there was a marathon going, she was pretty sure, either that or the hotel cable was somehow broken) and in some unspoken agreement they’d ended up sitting on the same bed.

They’d be back to normal come the end of the thing, the squirrel without his acorn, the bedside table separating them. They’d really be back to normal in a little over a day, back in their respective homes, back celebrating their respective holidays (as many times as Rachel had tried to explain that Hanukkah was not the most important Jewish holiday and was mostly seen as such in popular culture because of its proximity to Christmas), and back to that nebulous not-quite-frenemies space they occupied at McKinley.

And Rachel had no reason to bemoan this. She liked her life fine, better now that they had a legitimate shot at Nationals. Quinn shouldn’t have needed to be a thing she considered, at all, when she was thinking about it!

And that was of course made a lot harder by the fact that they were right next to each other, comfortable and familiar in a way they just hadn’t been before, watching the mammoths tearfully reunite.

“I don’t think they have the rights to any other movie,” Quinn said, breaking the relative silence. It did surprise Rachel a little bit, how quickly she’d adjusted to the amount of noise outside her window - idly she wondered what it’d be like when she returned home, how she’d cope with the utter and dead quiet. Maybe she’d get one of those nature sound CDs. They had to have an edition for the cityscape.

She couldn’t be the only one in that predicament.

“I think it might actually be three different movies.” She’d honestly lost track. “I saw a trailer for a fourth last month.”

“You can tell them apart?”

“Not really.” And back into the silence they went. A commercial break, an advertisement for the channel they were already watching. “But it’s important for me to track all aspects of the entertainment business, even the ones I’m not directly involved in - with the advent of movie musicals there’s more crossover between the mediums than ever before. I could be hired as a voice actor. Plenty of impressive Broadway people are.”

“That’s one way to be remembered.” Quinn laughed a little, breathy, and Rachel’s heart did a little backflip. “As a talking sloth.”

“I’d be singing in it, obviously. Otherwise there’s no point.”

“Sure.” The commercials kept running. It was late, for them to be playing a kids’ movie. Rachel wondered exactly who the target audience was supposed to be here. Quinn yawned. “I think I’m going to bed.”

“Okay.” Rachel waited for her to get up. She didn’t. She waited a little longer. She wondered if Quinn was going to actually say anything or if she was just going to sit there, watching the cartoon animals until they both fell asleep in a tangle of limbs, and it said something about both of their emotional states that Rachel actually really wanted that.

***

Quinn didn’t remember falling asleep. In general, she thought that anyone who said they did remember falling asleep was a liar, but when she woke up, Rachel was asleep next to her, mouth parted slightly, twitching like she was dreaming of stardom.

The sun rose, slowly, through the window. She couldn’t see the sun itself - not with all the buildings in the way, and belatedly she realized that Rachel had an arm draped over her torso so she couldn’t really move without waking her up. So she was effectively trapped here, at least for a little while.

Why didn’t she mind that? What had happened to her? Coach Sylvester would scoff, she knew that much, and even Santana and Brittany - intertwined as their hands always were, always giving each other those looks that would make anyone feel left out - would probably laugh. Rachel Berry. What a joke.

Rachel stirred, slightly, making a little noise that sounded wholly unlike her singing voice, or like her speaking voice for that matter. Unguarded.

“‘Morning,” Quinn said.

“He didn’t get the acorn, did he?”

Or maybe she was still asleep. “What.”

“In the movie, the squirrel. He kept trying and trying but he couldn’t get it.” She sat up, then, more alert than anyone had any right to be this early in the morning. “I think it was meant to be a metaphor for unattainable dreams. Either that or they needed a hook for the rest of the franchise.”

“I have no idea,” Quinn sighed, beginning to lean back.

“I can’t imagine they’ll make any more of those, though.”

“What’s on the itinerary for the grand finale of this?” It came out less sarcastic than she planned it to.

“Oh.” Rachel reached over to her side of the bedside table - and how had it ended up that in this single week they’d ended up with a system involving Rachel having a side of the bedside table? - and flipped through the thing. Even from where she sat, Quinn could see that it was blank. “I guess we did everything. I think I left the last day blank in case we ran out of time, but I’ve visited most of the important places and took your suggestions into account and I made a point not to include everything in there because otherwise I’d be inviting the idea of never going back here, which of course won’t happen, because we’re going back for Nationals and I’ll be living here and then you can see me and say that you were there.” Rachel exhaled, then. So she did have limits.

“Are you done?”

“You understand my theory here, right? If we saw everything there wouldn’t be anything left for next time.”

Quinn understood this very well. She, of course, would never admit this, but she did understand it.

“So let’s embrace that,” she sighed, leaning back on the downy pillow, her neck sore from whatever position she’d fallen asleep in last night. “Room service. Animated movie marathons. Whatever you can think of.”

“I was thinking of something else.” Rachel stood near the door, and Quinn felt at that moment that something very strange and very Rachel-esque was going to happen.

***

Rachel knew that, typically, you needed a permit to busk in or around public parks. She also knew that if you didn’t take life and opportunity like a bull by the horns you’d regret it for the rest of your life, and a lifetime of slushie-ing had prepared her for quick getaways in any case, so if the worst came to worst she’d just make a break for it.

“We don’t have any equipment,” Quinn said, and somehow this was the only smartass-y thing she’d said about the plan since Rachel had pitched it and the two of them had ended up in the same spot they’d been in, before, what felt like a million years ago.

“We have ourselves.” Rachel considered holding Quinn’s hand. She didn’t do it, of course, because that would open up a whole host of things neither of them were prepared for, but she did consider it. “And I think that’s enough.”

“You’re not going to upload this to your MySpace, are you?”

“Pfft, of course not. I haven’t used that thing since I joined Glee Club, and besides I don’t have anything to record with.” She didn’t say that it was because she didn’t need to just watch herself - that she could see the people around her, now, and that wasn’t something very easily captured on video. And she wasn’t fancy enough to have a cellphone that could film things.

“Here goes what would be the end of my social career at McKinley, then.” Quinn took a deep breath. Rachel still didn’t hold her hand, but she knocked her shoulder against Quinn’s, and she relaxed.

“So it’s a good thing nobody knows us here.”

And then they smiled at each other, and it felt like a strange and private thing, a together thing, a secret, and then they sang.

***

Quinn was pretty sure that Rachel had been banking on a big-shot Broadway producer discovering them both in the park and signing her on the spot (Quinn’s place in the equation was, as always, unclear), but she’d been in high spirits all day and all night anyhow. So it was fine, that she’d done something so public, and just had to trust that everyone who saw it was a stranger, someone who probably thought they were a couple trying a weird date idea.

It was fine.

***

Rachel fell asleep that night imagining herself and Quinn standing on a stage full of fake grass and plaster rocks, the crowd watching in rapt attention, holding their collective breaths as she leaned in and Quinn did the same and they almost, almost made it, but then she woke up and Quinn was in the bed opposite her own.

No, not her own, this was a bed she would likely never sleep in again and it would do her no good to think of it as hers.

It was early, anyway, and Quinn would be asleep for some time longer, so she could try to go back to the dream, even though she knew as she closed her eyes that it wouldn’t happen, not in the same way.

***

Quinn awoke to Rachel flinging open every cabinet and drawer in the room, throwing things back into her suitcase with a speed and precision that was honestly a little frightening. In another world, another version of everything, she would’ve been some kind of athlete.

“Come on,” she said, as soon as Quinn sat up. “We’re heading home today.”

“Oh.” So we are.

This would not be the last time they were here - Quinn knew that as well as anyone. They’d make it to Nationals this year, and Rachel would go to one of the colleges she’d dragged them both to visit, and maybe (and it was a big maybe) she’d visit her. Or something.

It wasn’t out of the question.

That didn’t mean it’d happen, just that it wasn’t impossible.

Anyway.

“The return trip is a little bit less stressful - I built more breathing room into the schedule this time, you know, just in case.”

“Of course.”

“I know you’re making fun of me.” Rachel said this without looking at her.

“Maybe.”

“You won’t be laughing when we actually get to rest instead of hopping from train to train like a group of stuntpeople.”

“I’ll take your word on it.” Did she want to get up, face the world, go home? Of course she didn’t. That didn’t change what she actually did, which was exactly that.

***

They reached the train station with a ridiculous amount of time on their hands, which was perfectly fine by Rachel, because she would not have a repeat of the last time, she would not fall apart in front of Quinn again, and she would make it to the Dunkin’ Donuts this time.

One of those things happened, at least. The line was blissfully empty, and she decided to take the slightly sticky bag as a good omen, because how else could she take it?

It was weird, being so relaxed around Quinn like this, but it wasn’t unwelcome, and so it was that the two of them found a place to sit and Quinn rested on her duffel bag again and they split a donut and it felt so much easier than anything ever ought to.

***

The way back passed in a way that could most accurately be described as a blur - Quinn knew as it was happening that she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint any specific moment of it, that when she tried to recall it she’d just remember the donuts, and Rachel leading her through, and buses and trains and schedules all taking them slowly, surely, back home.

***

Rachel stared out the window as the train thunked down the tracks, watching everything pass by, and as the sun went down she could see Quinn’s reflection in there, slight enough that she could still focus on the outside if she wanted to, but if she was being entirely honest (and she tried to be honest unless lying could help her in some way, which it often could, but that was beside the point) she didn’t want to.

She closed her eyes after a while and felt comforted, so strangely comforted, by Quinn’s presence next to her.

***

They arrived at the familiar Lima bus stop in the early hours of the next morning, and Quinn thought everything looked slightly sharper at night. That could’ve been the delirium talking. She wasn’t entirely sure.

In any case, she slung her duffel bag over her shoulder and waved goodbye to Rachel and prepared, as best she could, for what lay ahead.