A Ghost Story
Title: A Ghost Story
Author(s): tawg and hopenight
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Will/Finn past Will/Terri, past Finn/Quinn
Warnings: suicide, some disturbing imagery
Word Count: tawg- 2, 308 and hopenight-6, 789
Summary: The Suicides of William McKinley High are as mysterious and tragic as can be imagined. The tale of the first death with Will Schuester seems to be the trigger for the rest. Finn Hudson, after a botched attempt, seems the spirit of the man. Haunted by the spirit’s gray eyes and sad voice, Finn embarks on a journey to free Will from his chains on her Earth…except some may not want Will to be free at all.
A/N: It’s a whole story. Basically tawg had this fic that she had lost inspiration for. I asked to take a look at it. She let me look at it and expand on it with her opening in place. So this whole thing is thanks to her amazing and awesome talents. I bow to her feet and kiss her boots. She’s just the best person ever and was so supportive during the process even beta-ing this work. You’re awesome darlin’! This was written for the winnners monthly challenge.
The story went that, five years ago, the Spanish teacher had killed himself on the school grounds. And that part was certainly true - everyone looked it up in their first year at William McKinley, the microfilms at the school were smudged with fingerprints, the yearbook fell open to his teacher photo. His first year at the school, and while he grinned in his photo everyone agreed that of course there was a tragic sadness in his eyes.
But then, the story went on, the next year came around and during exams a cheerleader hanged herself in the Spanish room. That was harder to find out about, certainly if you wanted anything more than the phrase ‘tragic incident’, and a photo of a blonde girl with a sharp face and a white smile. The Spanish class was moved to the opposite end of the building, on a different floor, and the old classroom became a storage room filled with dust and broken chairs, and occasional couples making out.
But then the next year came, and another girl hanged herself in the room. It was locked after that. It was another tragic incident, but it was setting a disturbing trend. There needed to be more programs with a positive focus at William McKinley high school, and less thinking about the past. Students, Mister Figgins said, needed to be thinking about their futures, about the rest of their lives.
From then on, students were given mandatory counseling slots when exams came around, and Miss Pillsbury was pretty nice and all of that but she was new, and no one is ever really honest, not with the guidance counsellor. Before exams were over the door was found unlocked, with another girl hanging inside.
The next year, exams were held off campus, and the school was closed for fumigation. There was no breaking news of another suicide at the school, but there was a girl. She had - so the papers and the faculty said - gone to her locker to retrieve a text book, and choked on the fumes. It was, everyone agreed, a tragic incident. And everyone knew that somehow, that wasn’t what had happened at all.
And then it was this year. Five years since the first suicide. Three years since Finn had started high school. One year since he had gotten together with Quinn Fabray. Two months since she had told him that she was pregnant. Five hours since he had found out the truth about that. Finn was a sucker, a loser, and he knew that. He was never getting out of Lima. With his grades, he probably wasn’t going to pass the year. He had wanted to make his mother proud, and there was nothing in him that could do that anymore. Finn knew the pattern, he knew where the old Spanish room was, he figured the knot probably wasn’t that hard.
The door was locked, but it opened the second time he jiggled the handle. The room was dusty, making him sneeze as he dragged a wobbly desk to the middle of the room. The air was cold, getting colder. His breath was misting, and he could feel his hands getting numb, even as he watched them tying a noose without any input from his brain. It felt like football did sometimes, when his body knew what to do all by itself, and his brain was just sitting there watching. He went to get up on the desk, when he felt a hand clap down onto his shoulder. It sucked the heat out of him, making him start and shudder and he didn’t know what was going on, but it was too hard to think and there was a feeling like fingers of ice around his neck. He was dizzy, and he couldn’t breathe, and he was probably going to freeze to death somehow before he even got around to killing himself. Which was seriously lame. And then,
“You’re not Terri.”
The hands were gone, and Finn stumbled into the desk, breathing hard and shivering and his fingers were blue. He turned around, and through fuzzy vision and the dust that had been kicked up he could make out a sweater vest, and a white shirt, and a pair of sad eyes.
No one died that year.
*
Without his girlfriend, and without his best friend, Finn had a lot more spare time on his hands. And he was never really great at looking stuff up. He knew Wikipedia, and that was it, and there really wasn’t anything helpful in the article about the William McKinley High suicides. No mention of anyone called Terri. Not even much about Mr Schuester, even less than the school library had.
So Finn went to the library, and spent far too long looking at files of newspapers, not even knowing what he was looking for. He looked through editions of the Thunderclap, going years and years before Mr Schuester even started teaching at the school. And then he found the photos of the ’93 junior prom. Will Schuester, said one caption, and Terri Delmonico. He’d found her. With her name, everything was suddenly easier. He found the notice of engagement in the local newspaper, but there was never any marriage notice. No wedding ring in the teacher photo. Something happened, then. Something that he never forgave her for (and Finn could identify with that). Something he wanted revenge for. No fury like a Spanish teacher scorned.
But that was still no reason for it, not a good reason anyway. Killing girls (and boys who in retrospect didn’t really want to die at all) because you’re mad at someone else just isn’t cool. The school sucked because of this stupid ghost story. It made people scared, and vulnerable, and everyone was on edge and maybe if people weren’t so convinced that someone was going to die, maybe less people would volunteer for that position, you know. So Finn packed up his things and slung his bag over his shoulder. He headed for the old Spanish room, but the door wouldn’t unlock this time no matter how hard he jiggled the handle, and so he kicked at it, trying to bust it down.
And that’s when Coach Tanaka finds him.
And that’s how he wound up in Miss Pillsbury’s office.
“So, Finn,” she said. “I think that we should really talk about you, and what’s going on with you right now.” Her eyes were wide, and worried, and cautious. But they got even wider when Finn asked,
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Um, well.” She paused, clearly trying to organise some words on the topic. “I think that there are things that can sometimes happen, that make us think of other people. And that, maybe, there are times where, um-”
“Because I think I saw Mr Schuester in the Spanish room a few nights ago,” Finn blurted out.
Miss Pillsbury opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She took a deep breath, and said “Mr Schuester has been dead. For a long time.”
“I know.” Finn replied. “I mean, living people don’t have ghosts, right?”
“Finn,” she said after another long pause. “What were you doing in the Spanish room? You said that you saw him in there.”
And then it was Finn’s turn to open his mouth and close it again. He could feel that he was about to get into deep shit. He couldn’t be honest, and he wasn’t not smart enough to lie his way out of this, so he tried a mix of both. “I was curious,” he said at last. “I mean, things have been really crappy lately, and everyone thinks about suicide around exams, right? I mean, we’re all waiting for someone to... And I guess I figured I wanted to know why, you know? Why someone would do that, why the old Spanish room.”
He trailed off, and he could see that Miss Pillsbury was thinking hard about whether to believe him or not. “I understand,” she said at last, “that the room is becoming something of a symbol to the students. A place where bad things happen, and so maybe sometimes people go there because they want something bad to happen.” She looked at him expectantly.
“Like, how if you want to go on a rollercoaster, you have to go to a theme park?” Finn asked.
“Just like that. Except, not at all like that. Finn-”
“I don’t want to die,” Finn blurted out. “I mean, I just... You’re right. That room means stuff.”
Miss Pillsbury looked at him for a long while, and then started nodding. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, you know what? Maybe it’s time that it stopped being a symbol. Maybe it’s time that people realised that it’s just a room, and that four walls don’t have to mean anything.”
Finn looked at her, at her wide eyes, and the slight flush on her cheeks, and how determined she suddenly looked. “You mean you want to go into the room?”
She paused then, suddenly rethinking. But she said yes.
*
The door didn’t unlock on its own this time, it needed a key. And the air wasn’t cold, its warm and stuffy and smelled a little like rot.
“Okay,” Miss Pillsbury said from the doorway. “It’s okay. I mean, it needs a dust and a vacuum and maybe some bleach. Eight bottles or so. But, you know, its fine, just a room. Just a really old, filthy room.”
Finn saw the wobbly desk in the middle of the room, where he had left it. It brought a lump to his throat.
“See, Finn? There’s no one here. No ghosts.”
And she was right, of course. The room was completely different by day. It felt completely unlike it had a few nights ago, and Finn didn’t like that because if there was no ghost, then there was no one that he could be angry at, no one that he could blame for... He closed his eyes, and tried to picture the room as it had been. His breath misting in the air, the numbness. He was trying to bring it all back, to feel the cold in his fingers again. Tried to get his head back into the same place it had been when he’d first broken in. Tried to remember all of those songs he’d been playing too loud after Quinn told him that...
“How long, how long will I slide,” he sings softly.
“Separate my side; I don't,
I don't believe it's bad
Slittin' my throat
it's all I ever...”
And of course this was the perfect song. He could feel it in the way the hair on the back of his neck stood up, in the way his throat felt cold when he inhaled.
“I heard your voice through a photograph
I thought it up; it brought up the past
Once you know you can never go back
I've got to take it on the otherside.”
Finn stopped to breathe, his chest felt cold and shivery, and another voice picked up where he left off.
“Centuries are what it meant to me
A cemetery where I marry the sea.”
Finn opened his eyes, and there wasn’t not quite enough in front of him to be a person. He was sure that he saw most of it because he wanted too - a beam of sunlight catching on dust motes became a cheek, faded posters blended together and gave colour to a knitted vest, shirtsleeves were rolled up, and maybe there was something too that gave shape to eyebrows, that made two grey points of sad eyes. But the voice was there. Finn felt Miss Pillsbury standing close to him, and knew that this was real.
“Stranger things could never change my mind
I gotta take it on the otherside
Take it on the otherside
Take it on...”
It faded away, everything faded away, and the two of them stood completely motionless for a moment. “That really happened, right?”
“I think that we need to go.” Miss Pillsbury replied carefully.
“Yeah, okay. But that really happened, right?”
She didn’t answer him, and Finn knew girls well enough to know that meant yes.
*
Rumors in high school are fickle things. They are started with barely a whisper from one person to another. Gossip was one thing that Finn admitted he didn’t care for. He saw no reason in tearing someone’s reputation down for the improvement of another’s. Despite his distaste for it, the gossip mill at William McKinley High School kept churning. Apparently, someone had seen him and Miss Pillsbury go into the locked classroom.
Or better known amongst the students: ‘the suicide room’.
No one said high schoolers were a creative bunch.
The school was a-twitter that they had come out alive. Finn had gotten slaps on the back from the football players, looks of worship from the freshman, and more than a couple brave souls had asked him what happened in there. Finn kept his mouth shut. All his thoughts kept on going back to was the image of piercing gray eyes and an echo of a siren voice.
He evaded the questions and statements and looks until Artie Abrams sought him out.
Artie Abrams was about as far from Finn Hudson on the social ladder as one could get. Finn never actively helped the football players torture Artie, but he never did anything to help him either (discounting one time where the guys went too far and locked the kid in a Port-o-John). So it was a surprise when Artie wheeled next to him in Study Hall one day.
They sat in a silence for several moments before Artie had gathered the courage to speak.
“Y-you heard him di-didn’t you?” whispered Artie, sounding a lot like that Asian chick he hung around with.
Finn stared at Artie, knowing that his shock was clear on his face.
“Excuse me?” asked Finn stunned.
Artie squared his shoulders and looked Finn dead in the eye. The quarterback shifted under Artie’s hard gaze that seemed to be searching him for something.
Evidently, Artie found what he was looking for because he spoke again, “You heard him right? The ghost who sings from the suicide room?”
“How do you know about that?” demanded Finn seriously. Artie looked down at the book in front of him for several moments.
“Because I’ve heard him too,” confessed the wheelchair bound boy, “Especially after a really bad day. I need to pass the room on the way to my locker. And…I can just hear him sing.”
“Have others…?” began Finn but he couldn’t bear to finish the question.
He was nervous about what the answer might be.
“Kurt Hummel told me that he hears it,” said Artie slowly, “Mercedes Jones said she can hear it sometimes along with a piano playing. And…”
Artie went ashen. His thin, long fingered hands gripped the arm rests of his chair tighter; turning his knuckles white. Finn vaguely noticed that Artie went the same color grey as the ghost’s eyes. He watched him take a steadying breath.
“And Rachel Berry told me that she could hear him too.”
It was barely a whisper. So soft that most wouldn’t believe they heard him.
To Finn, it was like Artie had screamed the news at the top of his lungs. Finn knew that he went the same color as Artie at that news. The news hit him like a punch to the gut. He wasn’t even sure that he was breathing in the moments following that revelation.
Rachel Berry was the girl who died last year. The one they had been told was a “tragic accident”.
Finn remained sitting there, long after the bell rang and Artie had rolled away.
He wondered how many of the girls who committed suicide had heard the deadly song and the sad voice. He wondered how many of them saw a pair of sad grays eyes just before the last breath left their body with a haunting melody ringing in their eyes.
He could feel resolve steel in him. He wanted answers.
No.
He needed answers.
Let it be said that Finn Hudson wasn’t a determined person.
Part Two