Fic: Chances (6/ )
title: Chances (6/ )
fandom: Glee
pairing: Rachel/Will
rating: PGish
spoilers: Through Sectionals.
a/n: Yeah, I couldn't not post the next part. I've been itching to get to it for a while now, so I decided to go crazy and post two parts at once :) Thank you to my awesome beta, takemeaway.
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Rachel reaches her fingertips to the toes of her right foot and leans into the stretch. Sam is adamant that his actors thoroughly warm up before performing and he says it’s good for team building too. The rumor is he uses the time to identify the most flexible women so he can weigh his options.
“You’re looking pretty cheery lately,” Shawna comments.
“Do I?” Rachel asks distractedly as she changes positions.
Shawna nods and raises an eyebrow, motioning with her eyes over Rachel’s shoulder. Rachel follows her look and catches Sam’s eye as he walks slowly past, in the middle of a monologue about being present in their truest selves.
Rachel turns back and gives Shawna a look.
“Come on, Berry, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“Actually I hadn’t,” Rachel says primly. She rolls over and lays on her back with her legs bent and her palms flat on the stage floor as Sam has instructed them.
“Ooooh, I see how it is. Keeping it on the down low, avoiding those casting couch rumors?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, there’s nothing going on with us,” Rachel hisses. She pauses, then adds, “Anyway I’m currently involved with someone.”
“Really? How come you never talk about him? Or her. Oh my gosh, that’s why! You’re totally gay aren’t you?”
“This is work, and I’m here to perform. I don’t need to spread intimate details about my personal life around at every opportunity. And no I’m not gay, but I find your cavalier attitude insensitive.”
Rachel closes her eyes and imagines the glowing ball of light, as instructed, and pushes all thoughts of Shawna out of her head.
Sam has everyone stand in a circle and look into each other’s eyes. Rachel stares past the faces and lets Will into her mind, concentrating on her pulse, on her lips pressing together and deep warm sensation of presence in her middle at the thought of him.
She realizes Sam is standing behind Shawna, staring at her over Shawna’s shoulder across the circle. Rachel clears her throat and looks away quickly.
She glances down at the watch her character wears and calculates the hours until he’ll call, and the days until her flight back to Ohio for Thanksgiving.
_
Finn taps his fingers on his steering wheel impatiently and glances again at his phone sitting on the empty passenger seat. He changes the radio station, folds his arms over his chest, and hums along for a few bars.
Finally, he gets a text message: “Just landed, will txt when I get my luggage.”
He sighs.
It’s been just over five months since he’s seen her, and he really misses her. They talked on the phone almost every day at first, and then every few days, and then the last few months it was more like once a week.
Finn leans over and lugs his backpack up from the floor on the passenger side and tosses it in the back seat. College hasn’t been what he’d expected. Scholarships, he’d discovered, demanded both excellent grades and slightly more talent than he naturally had for music.
(“Finn, you have to keep auditioning. Trust me, I did my first audition when I was a week old and I haven’t stopped since. Tenacity is a hallmark of greatness.”
“Um, I just really like to sing, Rachel. I’m not all . . . Jehovah’s Witness about it like you are. It’s okay, really.”
Rachel had sighed her disappointment, but Finn let it roll off his back.)
Faced with the decision to hang his next four years on either football or music, Finn chose neither, enrolled in Lima Community College, and got a job working with Burt Hummel in his garage.
He took up ultimate Frisbee with a few guys from his Bio class and joined an informal a cappella group. Those activities, classes, and phone calls with Rachel have defined the beginning of college for him.
Well, that, and lots of beer pong.
_
When she drops her bag to jump up and hug him, Finn smiles. He picks her up and listens to her laugh as he spins her around before putting her back on the ground.
“Hi,” she says, and he grins at her.
Seeing her again is a bigger deal than he’d anticipated, and it’s kinda lame but all he can think about as they walk back to his car, him with her bag hefted over his shoulder and her with her arm through his like she always does, is how he wants to be holding her hand.
He takes her to Breadsticks when she says she can’t face her dads on an empty stomach, and she finally stops talking a mile a minute when there’s food in her mouth.
(He’s glad she said something because he was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to say anything, but she looked so skinny. Not that she was fat before or anything, but still. Apparently she hadn’t been exaggerating about the Ramen.)
He takes a drink of his Coke and mutters into it,
“Missed you Rachel.”
She smiles and puts her hand on his arm. “Me too,” she says when she swallows.
Then she continues, and it’s not until she’s telling him about something ‘Will’ said on the phone that he thinks maybe she didn’t miss him as much as he missed her. It feels like slamming into a wall.
_
Rachel stands still for a moment in the driveway looking at the house. Finn stands uncertainly on the other side of the car, half in and half out of the driver’s seat. She turns away and opens the back door to pull out her bag.
When she walks around the car she glances at Finn and paints a smile on quickly. She wishes, only for a few seconds but intensely, that he was Will. The distraction would be welcome. She pats Finn’s arm and makes her way to the front door.
She hears Finn’s door slam and the engine rev as he drives away while she regards the door. Her fathers won’t be home quite yet, and she’d planned it that way. Choosing her flight had been all about counting ahead to figure out how much time she could give herself before she’d have to see them.
Phone conversations had been sparse and tense after the first few tearful blow outs, but distance had tempered the strain of it. She’d been preparing for their reactions all the time she was planning her escape to New York, anticipating and steeling herself.
What she hadn’t envisioned was coming back like this - feeling like a stranger. Like she won’t know them anymore because now she knows too much.
Before there was nothing in the world beyond her daddies and singing (and sometimes a boy). She was surrounded with males, constantly it seemed, so it figured that only a woman could take away all that security and leave Rachel stumbling, unfamiliar.
She stares at the numbers on the door, wonders if there’s mail in the mail box. She wonders if anything inside the house has changed - if her room is as neat and relatively bare as she left it, or more so.
She’s stuck in the moment, standing in at her own front door, feeling like she should knock.
Knock on a door no one will answer.
She wants to call Will. She wants to call Finn. She wants someone besides either of them to call, to lean on.
She clenches her jaw, pulls out her keys, and lets herself in.
_
Will, smartly, gives a test the last day before Thanksgiving break.
He sits at his desk, zoned out, unable to focus on anything but the fact that, according to his watch, she’s literally less than ten miles away at this very moment. If he were trying to teach it would be a bust, so his somewhat last minute edit of his rubric seems at first like one of his best ideas ever.
Then he realizes that, once again, Rachel Berry has shot his lesson plans to hell. He suppresses a tense laugh and glances at his watch again.
_
fandom: Glee
pairing: Rachel/Will
rating: PGish
spoilers: Through Sectionals.
a/n: Yeah, I couldn't not post the next part. I've been itching to get to it for a while now, so I decided to go crazy and post two parts at once :) Thank you to my awesome beta, takemeaway.
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Rachel reaches her fingertips to the toes of her right foot and leans into the stretch. Sam is adamant that his actors thoroughly warm up before performing and he says it’s good for team building too. The rumor is he uses the time to identify the most flexible women so he can weigh his options.
“You’re looking pretty cheery lately,” Shawna comments.
“Do I?” Rachel asks distractedly as she changes positions.
Shawna nods and raises an eyebrow, motioning with her eyes over Rachel’s shoulder. Rachel follows her look and catches Sam’s eye as he walks slowly past, in the middle of a monologue about being present in their truest selves.
Rachel turns back and gives Shawna a look.
“Come on, Berry, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“Actually I hadn’t,” Rachel says primly. She rolls over and lays on her back with her legs bent and her palms flat on the stage floor as Sam has instructed them.
“Ooooh, I see how it is. Keeping it on the down low, avoiding those casting couch rumors?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, there’s nothing going on with us,” Rachel hisses. She pauses, then adds, “Anyway I’m currently involved with someone.”
“Really? How come you never talk about him? Or her. Oh my gosh, that’s why! You’re totally gay aren’t you?”
“This is work, and I’m here to perform. I don’t need to spread intimate details about my personal life around at every opportunity. And no I’m not gay, but I find your cavalier attitude insensitive.”
Rachel closes her eyes and imagines the glowing ball of light, as instructed, and pushes all thoughts of Shawna out of her head.
Sam has everyone stand in a circle and look into each other’s eyes. Rachel stares past the faces and lets Will into her mind, concentrating on her pulse, on her lips pressing together and deep warm sensation of presence in her middle at the thought of him.
She realizes Sam is standing behind Shawna, staring at her over Shawna’s shoulder across the circle. Rachel clears her throat and looks away quickly.
She glances down at the watch her character wears and calculates the hours until he’ll call, and the days until her flight back to Ohio for Thanksgiving.
_
Finn taps his fingers on his steering wheel impatiently and glances again at his phone sitting on the empty passenger seat. He changes the radio station, folds his arms over his chest, and hums along for a few bars.
Finally, he gets a text message: “Just landed, will txt when I get my luggage.”
He sighs.
It’s been just over five months since he’s seen her, and he really misses her. They talked on the phone almost every day at first, and then every few days, and then the last few months it was more like once a week.
Finn leans over and lugs his backpack up from the floor on the passenger side and tosses it in the back seat. College hasn’t been what he’d expected. Scholarships, he’d discovered, demanded both excellent grades and slightly more talent than he naturally had for music.
(“Finn, you have to keep auditioning. Trust me, I did my first audition when I was a week old and I haven’t stopped since. Tenacity is a hallmark of greatness.”
“Um, I just really like to sing, Rachel. I’m not all . . . Jehovah’s Witness about it like you are. It’s okay, really.”
Rachel had sighed her disappointment, but Finn let it roll off his back.)
Faced with the decision to hang his next four years on either football or music, Finn chose neither, enrolled in Lima Community College, and got a job working with Burt Hummel in his garage.
He took up ultimate Frisbee with a few guys from his Bio class and joined an informal a cappella group. Those activities, classes, and phone calls with Rachel have defined the beginning of college for him.
Well, that, and lots of beer pong.
_
When she drops her bag to jump up and hug him, Finn smiles. He picks her up and listens to her laugh as he spins her around before putting her back on the ground.
“Hi,” she says, and he grins at her.
Seeing her again is a bigger deal than he’d anticipated, and it’s kinda lame but all he can think about as they walk back to his car, him with her bag hefted over his shoulder and her with her arm through his like she always does, is how he wants to be holding her hand.
He takes her to Breadsticks when she says she can’t face her dads on an empty stomach, and she finally stops talking a mile a minute when there’s food in her mouth.
(He’s glad she said something because he was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to say anything, but she looked so skinny. Not that she was fat before or anything, but still. Apparently she hadn’t been exaggerating about the Ramen.)
He takes a drink of his Coke and mutters into it,
“Missed you Rachel.”
She smiles and puts her hand on his arm. “Me too,” she says when she swallows.
Then she continues, and it’s not until she’s telling him about something ‘Will’ said on the phone that he thinks maybe she didn’t miss him as much as he missed her. It feels like slamming into a wall.
_
Rachel stands still for a moment in the driveway looking at the house. Finn stands uncertainly on the other side of the car, half in and half out of the driver’s seat. She turns away and opens the back door to pull out her bag.
When she walks around the car she glances at Finn and paints a smile on quickly. She wishes, only for a few seconds but intensely, that he was Will. The distraction would be welcome. She pats Finn’s arm and makes her way to the front door.
She hears Finn’s door slam and the engine rev as he drives away while she regards the door. Her fathers won’t be home quite yet, and she’d planned it that way. Choosing her flight had been all about counting ahead to figure out how much time she could give herself before she’d have to see them.
Phone conversations had been sparse and tense after the first few tearful blow outs, but distance had tempered the strain of it. She’d been preparing for their reactions all the time she was planning her escape to New York, anticipating and steeling herself.
What she hadn’t envisioned was coming back like this - feeling like a stranger. Like she won’t know them anymore because now she knows too much.
Before there was nothing in the world beyond her daddies and singing (and sometimes a boy). She was surrounded with males, constantly it seemed, so it figured that only a woman could take away all that security and leave Rachel stumbling, unfamiliar.
She stares at the numbers on the door, wonders if there’s mail in the mail box. She wonders if anything inside the house has changed - if her room is as neat and relatively bare as she left it, or more so.
She’s stuck in the moment, standing in at her own front door, feeling like she should knock.
Knock on a door no one will answer.
She wants to call Will. She wants to call Finn. She wants someone besides either of them to call, to lean on.
She clenches her jaw, pulls out her keys, and lets herself in.
_
Will, smartly, gives a test the last day before Thanksgiving break.
He sits at his desk, zoned out, unable to focus on anything but the fact that, according to his watch, she’s literally less than ten miles away at this very moment. If he were trying to teach it would be a bust, so his somewhat last minute edit of his rubric seems at first like one of his best ideas ever.
Then he realizes that, once again, Rachel Berry has shot his lesson plans to hell. He suppresses a tense laugh and glances at his watch again.
_