Fic: Chances (5/ )
title: Chances (5/ )
fandom: Glee
pairing: Rachel/Will
rating: PG?
spoilers: Through Sectionals, it's my own version of canon after that.
a/n: What's that you say? It's been more than a week since I've posted? Well that's just ridiculous. takemeaway is my lovely beta, though there are some surprise new bits in this section that she hasn't read before, because I'm impatient.
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Rachel wakes up alone.
She and Will had finally separated from one another on the couch and she’d leaned against her kitchen counter staring into a glass of water while she listened to the faucet run in the bathroom. When the water turned off and Will stepped out she turned quickly and set the glass down.
She heard the floor creak as he took a few steps forward, then stopped. She waited him out.
“’Night Rachel,” he’d said quietly, finally. She turned when he did and watched him sink back onto her couch, looking exhausted. His white undershirt stood out in the dark, the blanket she’d handed him loosely wrinkled at his waist.
(“Thanks.” “You’re welcome.” She’d smiled and he’d stared down at her. She flew through a hundred memories of him, and they reached their crescendo in the current moment, where she gave him something and he accepted it. All she had wanted to do was grab the blanket back, hold onto something he held and keep him standing so close. She let go and brushed her palms over her thighs. Will cleared his throat.)
“Goodnight,” she answered. Her ears were ringing. She’d climbed back into bed and laid completely still, willing the clench of tension in her stomach to dissipate. Sleep hit her like a freight train and she’d never been more grateful.
Now she sits up in bed, staring around her apartment for any trace of him aside from the note on her bedside table:
Rachel,
I had to leave this morning to catch my flight back. I couldn’t wake you, knowing what your schedule must be like with eight shows a week. I’m so proud of you for everything you’ve accomplished.
I need some time, a few days, to work this all out in my head. I promise I’ll be in touch.
Can’t stop thinking about you already.
Will
He’s left his number and his email at the bottom, and they seem strange, sitting there beneath that last line. Rachel stares at the paper, fluttering a bit in her hands.
_
Her phone rings a few hours later.
It’s Finn.
He mentions he’s sorry he missed opening night, and she blurts it out because she hasn’t been able to hold another thought in her head for more than ten minutes before WillWillWill supercedes everything else.
He’d been a simmering presence in her mind almost since the beginning of Glee, but leaving Lima made the difference. Her mother’s blank face haunts her, and Finn’s voice sticks in her ear, telling her about home, which sounds so strange now. When she saw Will waiting for her backstage something floating loose in her landed and she could feel the ground steady beneath her feet again. Suddenly and completely, Will exists and he’s as real and as close as the heat on her face when the spotlight finds her on stage.
“Mr. Schuester came.”
“Really? Oh. That’s cool.”
“Yeah, he came to the show, and then we got dinner,” she adds.
“How’s he doing?” Finn asks mildly. Rachel rolls her eyes up to the ceiling.
“Good. It was really nice to get to know him better, now that he’s not our teacher anymore.”
“I guess.”
“And then he stayed the night. At my apartment. On the couch.”
Silence.
“Why didn’t he go to a hotel or something?”
“He was going to, but I said he could just stay with me. On the couch.”
“Huh.”
Rachel can hear the wheels turning from six hundred miles away.
Finn changes the subject, but he’s an open book even over the phone, and she hears a protective tightness in his voice.
When Finn says goodbye he pauses, and Rachel holds her breath.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he adds lightly before he hangs up.
She lets her phone slip from her fingers and lays back in bed.
She runs her hands lightly over her face and stares up at the ceiling, letting the tingle of happening spread slowly. Suddenly she has another secret, one with a line of pleasure alongside the edge of loss. Loss, yes, because now she doesn’t have the possibility of Will either; fantasies die when they’re fulfilled, she’s learning.
Telling-without-telling Finn makes it feel more real, less like something she’d dreamed in the throes of wine-sleep. Everything’s been the reverberant hum of the city, her lines constantly playing in her head for memorization purposes because it’s the reason she’s here after all.
She’s been running; to New York; running ragged through her days and nights onstage, feeling a thin layer of baby fat burned away by the hunger in her stomach, and seeing Will waiting for her backstage was an unexpected full stop. However much she wished she’d never thought she could expect him to appear like he had, and further still for just his presence to give her the flash of invigorating reassurance she’d been so desperate for.
For a moment, everything had stopped and she’d caught her breath because he was there just like that, for the cost of a stamp and a self-conscious flourish of a pen on the back of some newsprint.
When it all started again, his arms were around her, and she knew for certain what missing him had meant.
_
“Will?”
He can hear her smiling, and it doesn’t just make him smile back; he almost groans. Their phone conversations had almost immediately tipped into a well of sexual tension Will hadn’t even realized he’d been suppressing.
But there it is; Rachel’s voice, clear yet smoky over the line, threading into his ear and making him imagine her tongue and her legs and her fingertips. He spends his days now charged, powering through classes and rehearsals, hungry for her voice in the evenings.
“Yes, Rachel?” He dips his voice low.
He can tell from how she giggles that she likes it. It should freak him out more, he thinks, that he was her teacher, but that role was only ever a technicality to her to begin with. Still, she’d quit Glee a year and a month ago. When she was not quite eighteen. When she was his student.
“When do you think you might be able to come visit again?”
He pauses at that a moment, mentally scanning his vacation days, bank account, sense of decorum. He knows it’s still infatuation, knows he’s falling so easily into their almost-nightly conversations because they’re light and easy, unlike his previous year. If he really examines it, he feels entitled to the pleasure of it, whatever the consequences.
“I don’t know Rach,” he says.
There’s a beep and she says she’ll be right back, and he hears her pressing buttons. Probably a text message from Finn, or somebody from the play. Finn, she’s informed him, is almost useless with texting - he says his thumbs are too big for his phone.
Will’s found out a lot about Finn the past month since his visit to New York. Sometimes it chafes at him, and he knows he’s acting like a child and it’s the biggest indication that this is a tremendously bad idea-
Rachel comes back, and sighs over the line, “I miss you, you know.”
He doesn’t miss her, per se, because she’s still in his head as the girl with the knee socks, scolding or overwhelming or too, too sweet, depending on the day. That’s the version he has in his head on default, but it’s slowly being replaced by the reality of her, now.
He thinks about this new version of her (her features sharper, something softer and darker in her expressions. She dresses differently, simpler and not so bright. She still looks like herself essentially, but it’s more of a change than just looking older, and he can't put his finger on exactly what the difference is) more than he should, feels her sometimes on his skin like he’s back in her dark apartment on that couch.
“Will you be home for Thanksgiving?” he asks her, side stepping carefully.
“Yes,” she answers reluctantly.
“Well we’ll see each other then.”
“But -”
He grins at her pause. “What?”
He can read her easily as ever, and her one-word protest belies the wants listed in her tone; closer, more, touch, learn, now . . . it’s all her familiar intent desire, now directed at him and it’s wildly flattering. If she hadn’t been reminding him intermittently over the last three years that, silly man, he would never truly be in charge when it came to her, her favor - hero worship now tinged with lust and supported with the same simple affection as always - might go to his head.
“Nevermind.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Goodnight, Will.”
“Sweet dreams.”
There’s a pause before she hangs up.
Once she does Rachel sits up from where she’d flopped back on her bed to call him and looks around the room.
It’s cold, like usual, since heat costs money, and outside her window in the narrow space between her building and the next a few remnants of leaves collect in the window sills.
The sight, of papery leaves washed over with orange, rust, or dried-blood brown, reminds her of new school years. Of blank notebooks and fresh pencils. The smell of the inside of a school bus - rubber, bubble gum, perspiration - comes to her quickly, followed by cold glass under her curled fingers, swallowing back a lump in her throat formed from the utter guilt that filled her as she watched Will walk away from the bus that would take them to Regionals that first year.
She shivers and picks at the scarf around her neck, and when she reaches for the cup of tea she’d set on her bedside table, it’s not even lukewarm anymore. She’d already decided the best strategy was to leave her heat off for as long as she could stand it so she could afford to keep from freezing to death in her sleep when the real throes of winter descended on the city. That pragmatic thinking doesn’t do much to stave off a well of sadness from overflowing when she takes in the sight of her apartment bleakly lit by streetlights and neighboring apartment’s lamps.
When she frames it right in her mind it’s all very romantic and picturesque; the starving actress in her cold little studio, living on soup and applause, counting the minutes until curtain.
Sometimes, though, it catches her off-guard and she’s just alone in the cold.
She must sound happier to Will than she feels most of the time . . . but then she is happier when he’s laughing softly in her ear over the line. The warm timbre of his voice comes through over hundreds of miles to stir up warmth inside her till the cold recedes just a little. Just enough so she can breathe for a few minutes. Some note of tension is gone from their interactions, overshadowed by the ease with which they can relay the details of their days and the simple fact that they miss each other. Just saying it out loud to him is a relief after months of being unable to categorize it in a litany of emotional upheaval.
Now that the tacked-on titles are gone it’s just them, stepping outside the blurry chalk lines of their previous relationship and realizing with increasing frequency that while things are changing rapidly, the dynamic between them isn’t changing so much as settling. It’s as if there was a thread pulling between them, finally allowed to slacken, though it holds strong as ever.
_
fandom: Glee
pairing: Rachel/Will
rating: PG?
spoilers: Through Sectionals, it's my own version of canon after that.
a/n: What's that you say? It's been more than a week since I've posted? Well that's just ridiculous. takemeaway is my lovely beta, though there are some surprise new bits in this section that she hasn't read before, because I'm impatient.
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Rachel wakes up alone.
She and Will had finally separated from one another on the couch and she’d leaned against her kitchen counter staring into a glass of water while she listened to the faucet run in the bathroom. When the water turned off and Will stepped out she turned quickly and set the glass down.
She heard the floor creak as he took a few steps forward, then stopped. She waited him out.
“’Night Rachel,” he’d said quietly, finally. She turned when he did and watched him sink back onto her couch, looking exhausted. His white undershirt stood out in the dark, the blanket she’d handed him loosely wrinkled at his waist.
(“Thanks.” “You’re welcome.” She’d smiled and he’d stared down at her. She flew through a hundred memories of him, and they reached their crescendo in the current moment, where she gave him something and he accepted it. All she had wanted to do was grab the blanket back, hold onto something he held and keep him standing so close. She let go and brushed her palms over her thighs. Will cleared his throat.)
“Goodnight,” she answered. Her ears were ringing. She’d climbed back into bed and laid completely still, willing the clench of tension in her stomach to dissipate. Sleep hit her like a freight train and she’d never been more grateful.
Now she sits up in bed, staring around her apartment for any trace of him aside from the note on her bedside table:
Rachel,
I had to leave this morning to catch my flight back. I couldn’t wake you, knowing what your schedule must be like with eight shows a week. I’m so proud of you for everything you’ve accomplished.
I need some time, a few days, to work this all out in my head. I promise I’ll be in touch.
Can’t stop thinking about you already.
Will
He’s left his number and his email at the bottom, and they seem strange, sitting there beneath that last line. Rachel stares at the paper, fluttering a bit in her hands.
_
Her phone rings a few hours later.
It’s Finn.
He mentions he’s sorry he missed opening night, and she blurts it out because she hasn’t been able to hold another thought in her head for more than ten minutes before WillWillWill supercedes everything else.
He’d been a simmering presence in her mind almost since the beginning of Glee, but leaving Lima made the difference. Her mother’s blank face haunts her, and Finn’s voice sticks in her ear, telling her about home, which sounds so strange now. When she saw Will waiting for her backstage something floating loose in her landed and she could feel the ground steady beneath her feet again. Suddenly and completely, Will exists and he’s as real and as close as the heat on her face when the spotlight finds her on stage.
“Mr. Schuester came.”
“Really? Oh. That’s cool.”
“Yeah, he came to the show, and then we got dinner,” she adds.
“How’s he doing?” Finn asks mildly. Rachel rolls her eyes up to the ceiling.
“Good. It was really nice to get to know him better, now that he’s not our teacher anymore.”
“I guess.”
“And then he stayed the night. At my apartment. On the couch.”
Silence.
“Why didn’t he go to a hotel or something?”
“He was going to, but I said he could just stay with me. On the couch.”
“Huh.”
Rachel can hear the wheels turning from six hundred miles away.
Finn changes the subject, but he’s an open book even over the phone, and she hears a protective tightness in his voice.
When Finn says goodbye he pauses, and Rachel holds her breath.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he adds lightly before he hangs up.
She lets her phone slip from her fingers and lays back in bed.
She runs her hands lightly over her face and stares up at the ceiling, letting the tingle of happening spread slowly. Suddenly she has another secret, one with a line of pleasure alongside the edge of loss. Loss, yes, because now she doesn’t have the possibility of Will either; fantasies die when they’re fulfilled, she’s learning.
Telling-without-telling Finn makes it feel more real, less like something she’d dreamed in the throes of wine-sleep. Everything’s been the reverberant hum of the city, her lines constantly playing in her head for memorization purposes because it’s the reason she’s here after all.
She’s been running; to New York; running ragged through her days and nights onstage, feeling a thin layer of baby fat burned away by the hunger in her stomach, and seeing Will waiting for her backstage was an unexpected full stop. However much she wished she’d never thought she could expect him to appear like he had, and further still for just his presence to give her the flash of invigorating reassurance she’d been so desperate for.
For a moment, everything had stopped and she’d caught her breath because he was there just like that, for the cost of a stamp and a self-conscious flourish of a pen on the back of some newsprint.
When it all started again, his arms were around her, and she knew for certain what missing him had meant.
_
“Will?”
He can hear her smiling, and it doesn’t just make him smile back; he almost groans. Their phone conversations had almost immediately tipped into a well of sexual tension Will hadn’t even realized he’d been suppressing.
But there it is; Rachel’s voice, clear yet smoky over the line, threading into his ear and making him imagine her tongue and her legs and her fingertips. He spends his days now charged, powering through classes and rehearsals, hungry for her voice in the evenings.
“Yes, Rachel?” He dips his voice low.
He can tell from how she giggles that she likes it. It should freak him out more, he thinks, that he was her teacher, but that role was only ever a technicality to her to begin with. Still, she’d quit Glee a year and a month ago. When she was not quite eighteen. When she was his student.
“When do you think you might be able to come visit again?”
He pauses at that a moment, mentally scanning his vacation days, bank account, sense of decorum. He knows it’s still infatuation, knows he’s falling so easily into their almost-nightly conversations because they’re light and easy, unlike his previous year. If he really examines it, he feels entitled to the pleasure of it, whatever the consequences.
“I don’t know Rach,” he says.
There’s a beep and she says she’ll be right back, and he hears her pressing buttons. Probably a text message from Finn, or somebody from the play. Finn, she’s informed him, is almost useless with texting - he says his thumbs are too big for his phone.
Will’s found out a lot about Finn the past month since his visit to New York. Sometimes it chafes at him, and he knows he’s acting like a child and it’s the biggest indication that this is a tremendously bad idea-
Rachel comes back, and sighs over the line, “I miss you, you know.”
He doesn’t miss her, per se, because she’s still in his head as the girl with the knee socks, scolding or overwhelming or too, too sweet, depending on the day. That’s the version he has in his head on default, but it’s slowly being replaced by the reality of her, now.
He thinks about this new version of her (her features sharper, something softer and darker in her expressions. She dresses differently, simpler and not so bright. She still looks like herself essentially, but it’s more of a change than just looking older, and he can't put his finger on exactly what the difference is) more than he should, feels her sometimes on his skin like he’s back in her dark apartment on that couch.
“Will you be home for Thanksgiving?” he asks her, side stepping carefully.
“Yes,” she answers reluctantly.
“Well we’ll see each other then.”
“But -”
He grins at her pause. “What?”
He can read her easily as ever, and her one-word protest belies the wants listed in her tone; closer, more, touch, learn, now . . . it’s all her familiar intent desire, now directed at him and it’s wildly flattering. If she hadn’t been reminding him intermittently over the last three years that, silly man, he would never truly be in charge when it came to her, her favor - hero worship now tinged with lust and supported with the same simple affection as always - might go to his head.
“Nevermind.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Goodnight, Will.”
“Sweet dreams.”
There’s a pause before she hangs up.
Once she does Rachel sits up from where she’d flopped back on her bed to call him and looks around the room.
It’s cold, like usual, since heat costs money, and outside her window in the narrow space between her building and the next a few remnants of leaves collect in the window sills.
The sight, of papery leaves washed over with orange, rust, or dried-blood brown, reminds her of new school years. Of blank notebooks and fresh pencils. The smell of the inside of a school bus - rubber, bubble gum, perspiration - comes to her quickly, followed by cold glass under her curled fingers, swallowing back a lump in her throat formed from the utter guilt that filled her as she watched Will walk away from the bus that would take them to Regionals that first year.
She shivers and picks at the scarf around her neck, and when she reaches for the cup of tea she’d set on her bedside table, it’s not even lukewarm anymore. She’d already decided the best strategy was to leave her heat off for as long as she could stand it so she could afford to keep from freezing to death in her sleep when the real throes of winter descended on the city. That pragmatic thinking doesn’t do much to stave off a well of sadness from overflowing when she takes in the sight of her apartment bleakly lit by streetlights and neighboring apartment’s lamps.
When she frames it right in her mind it’s all very romantic and picturesque; the starving actress in her cold little studio, living on soup and applause, counting the minutes until curtain.
Sometimes, though, it catches her off-guard and she’s just alone in the cold.
She must sound happier to Will than she feels most of the time . . . but then she is happier when he’s laughing softly in her ear over the line. The warm timbre of his voice comes through over hundreds of miles to stir up warmth inside her till the cold recedes just a little. Just enough so she can breathe for a few minutes. Some note of tension is gone from their interactions, overshadowed by the ease with which they can relay the details of their days and the simple fact that they miss each other. Just saying it out loud to him is a relief after months of being unable to categorize it in a litany of emotional upheaval.
Now that the tacked-on titles are gone it’s just them, stepping outside the blurry chalk lines of their previous relationship and realizing with increasing frequency that while things are changing rapidly, the dynamic between them isn’t changing so much as settling. It’s as if there was a thread pulling between them, finally allowed to slacken, though it holds strong as ever.
_