Please Don't Go (1/3)
Name: Please Don't Go (1/3)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 3000
Spoilers: everything up to Laryngitis
Summary: Quinn's life is changing once again.
Author's Note: So, hey, do you remember the Love Story verse? Well, here's the newest addition to it. I should warn you, though, it isn't light and fluffy. It falls in the same timeline, but it's tone is completely different. And maybe you will cry. I hope you have your tissues :D And enjoy the first part! Also, I know I'm in the middle of Quinn Fabray and the Questionable Sweaters of Rachel Berry, but this just came at me and I couldn't stop myself.
Quinn gets the call in the middle of an appointment. She's just finishing up telling a kid that his shots won't turn his skin green or anything, and that they're nothing to be afraid of, and then her secretary is barging into the room, frantic, with Quinn's usually locked-up cell phone grasped in her hand.
Quinn has never felt more afraid in her entire life as when she looks over at the kid quickly, this kid who's been crying for the last five minutes over getting his tetanus shot and the phone that clearly displays a call from NYU Medical Center's Emergency Room, because her secretary looks pleading and wild-eyed, and she doesn't ever get a call from the hospital unless it's one of her patients who's in intensive care.
Her heart wrenches in her chest and twists around, and she apologizes quickly to the mother of the child and takes the phone, telling the other doctor at her practice to get the kid to take his damn shots and then she says, "Hello," into the phone, like her entire life isn't waiting on the other side.
"Dr. Fabray? It's Kevin, down at the NYU ER - I guess you already knew that. But your wife - "
And that is all Quinn needs to know to throw her lab coat off her and at her desk chair, grabbing her purse and laptop case and rushing out of the building, trying to ignore the pounding in her head.
She takes the subway - that's how she gets to work every day, and the bus would take too long - but it feels like forever, transferring from the red line to the yellow to the green and sprinting out of the station at 33rd street. She grabs the first college kid she sees and flashes her badge - she's a consulting physician at the hospital and gets perks like an office she never uses - and makes them have a walk and talk about how Quinn Fabray is in the building and how she needs to see Rachel's current ER physician the minute he finds the time to pull his head out of his ass and realize that Quinn fucking Fabray is here. She drops the poor attending after she pushes through the ER doors with a flourish, dropping her laptop case at the nurse's station and following a wordless nurse's pointing to room thirteen.
The sight she is greeted with upon entry is not promising. Rachel is hooked up to an IV and what looks like the beginnings of a morphine drip, and her face is scraped all along the right side. It's terrifying, and Quinn can't even feel her hands as she steps up to the hospital bed and drapes her fingers over the edge.
She doesn't even quite know what happened, Kevin had just told her that Rachel was here, and unconscious, and that it looked bad and that absolutely terrified her. It should, actually, because Rachel had been her girlfriend since the tail end of their sophomore year and they had been married for ten years and the only time Rachel's ever been in the ER was last year when Alex had been born, and even then, it had literally been for the five seconds it took for Quinn to say that her wife was in labor and that they needed to get to the OB unit in the fastest transfer the entire hospital had ever undertaken.
Rachel was also knocked the hell out, and judging by the lack of people in the room besides Quinn, no one was going to be able to tell Quinn what had really happened until the attending physician got into the room.
She watches as her wife shifts just a tiny bit in her sleep, before she makes a small sound, her hand twitching too little for it to be just sleep. Quinn can't even breathe. She grabs at the charts at the end of the bed, and the information greeting her is not comforting, still. It had been a fall from a set, up higher than Rachel probably should've been or would've been if Quinn had anything to do with it. She had hit the ground and had been out like a light ever since. It was already written in that she had a concussion, although a blind person could've probably determined that.
"Ah, Dr. Fabray, I heard you were here."
Quinn doesn't drop the charts, just clenches them in her hands and looks up to the familiar visage of the director of the entire unit, Dr. Jansen. She doesn't bother to shake his hand, just nods and looks back down to the chart and the familiar numbers and names and information that Quinn's learned over the years, down to the pistachios that Rachel is allergic to. This cannot be happening.
Dr. Jansen steps a little closer to her, not encroaching on her space, just surveys her.
"Maybe you should put the charts down, Quinn," he says softly, because Quinn is flipping from the preliminary chart to the information page and she knows what's happening and it kills.
She doesn't hand the clipboard over, just clenches it tighter in her already too-pale hands, leaning forward a little and bracing herself on the end of the bed, staring down the linen sheets to her wife, who should really be at home and preparing to get Haley. And God, Quinn needs to call Haley, who's sixteen and is probably flipping out that Rachel isn't home right now, because sixteen year olds know how to flip the fuck out on a grand scale.
"When is she getting moved?" Quinn asks, dropping the chart into its holder and moving over to the side of the bed not accompanied by the two drips and sliding her fingers over Rachel's hand. It doesn't move, doesn't react, and Quinn just knows.
Dr. Jansen watches her for a moment longer, and frowns.
"Whenever her attending deems her stable. I'm sorry this has happened, Quinn - "
"I don't really want to hear this speech from the other end, Dr. Jansen. I need to...call my daughter so she can go pick up her brother at daycare," Quinn whispers, running her fingers over Rachel's hand and hoping against hope that she's wrong and that this isn't happening.
Dr. Jansen leaves as quickly as he came.
//
Quinn hates the ICU. She doesn't go up there often - it's like death is just stalking the corridors and she can't deal that well with it. It hurts way worse, of course, when she's having to take one of her kids down to the children's ICU, but she doesn't usually have to.
Rachel's room is small and it's clean and it's a good room - Quinn knows it's the biggest one on the unit because she knows this hospital like the back of her hand, and she knows it's no mistake that her wife is the one occupying the room. She isn't hooked up to ventilator, thank the lord, because Quinn probably couldn't be able to stand it if her usually vibrant and verbose wife was being forced to breathe by a machine. Dr. Allen, down in ER had already handed Rachel off, after she was completely unresponsive to all stimuli.
The worst part about this whole mess was that Rachel didn't have much else going on. Facial lacerations and some stitches along her hairline, and a broken wrist, and a possible hematoma on her leg. Nothing else. Just...this.
Quinn can't even breathe, so she just sits down in the chair in the far corner of the room and watches her wife breathe in and out, in and out. That's better than she can do.
//
Haley doesn't get into the building until around seven at night, and Quinn hears her coming from halfway across the unit. Her daughter is too much like her mothers - both of them - and has inherited Rachel's penchant for being excitable and being loud about it, and Quinn's ability to make others fear her with simple looks and barely veiled threats.
Haley stops in the doorway of the room, panting a little, her fingers clutching her lanyard tightly. She looks from Rachel on the bed, breathing slowly and not moving to Quinn in the chair, legs crossed up under her and eyes glued to her daughter. Quinn can't quite tell what's going on in her daughter's head, because her jaw is clenching and unclenching, but she has enough presence of mind to step back outside the room and get antibacterial foam from the dispenser right outside before she steps back in and looks back down at Rachel.
"What happened?" she finally asks, looking over at Quinn. For the first time, Quinn can see the shiny quality of her hazel eyes, too bright for it to be normal. Quinn doesn't say anything, just slides out of her chair and stands up, moving over to her wife's bedside, beckoning their daughter closer.
"She fell off a set," Quinn mutters, reaching for Rachel's hand and frowning sadly when she sees the morphine and IV drips up at the bend of her elbow. "She hasn't woken up since."
Haley steps a little closer to Quinn, and Quinn wraps her arm around the girl, reeling her in. She watches as Rachel's heart rate monitor continues on and she feels Haley drop her head under Quinn's chin, unintentionally mimicking Rachel's usual positioning.
"She's in a coma," Haley whispers, her smaller hand sliding down to worm under Quinn's and over Rachel's. Quinn doesn't have the heart to say yes, so she just nods a little. Haley sinks in her embrace a little more.
//
She doesn't go home the first night. The hour-long shift change is brutal, and after she sends Haley to the other Haley's house, she commandeers a couch in the ICU waiting room and tries to ignore all the other sad-looking people in the room. She doesn't sleep, either, just stares into the darkness until they let her back in.
She spends the rest of the night at Rachel's bedside, watching nurses come in and out and checking machines and Rachel's charts every forty-five minutes, right on schedule. She knows, intellectually, that she is probably in the way, and that she's torturing herself by sitting here and expecting something extraordinary to happen. She went to medical school, she's seen people in comas before, she knows what the rates are and what all this could mean for her, for her life.
Quinn doesn't quite know what her life would be without Rachel. She's known the woman her entire life, she's been with her for a little over half of it, and she doesn't know what her life even looks like with Rachel in it. She's her wife, her partner, her best friend. And she was in a coma, and Quinn remembers all the stuff she absorbed in her neurology class downtown, and she remembers the facts and the numbers and she knows that this could go sideways eighteen ways to Sunday.
Michael and Aaron get there on the second day Rachel is in the hospital, and they drag her out to lunch. Or, they drag her down to the hospital cafeteria where she blearily scans her badge for all three of their meals, and stares at her already slim meal with contempt. Michael watches her watch her food, before he gently pokes at her shoulder.
"Quinnie, honey," he says, sounding too sad for it to really be Michael. Michael was supposed to be the dad who took her to an adult toy store the day she got accepted to NYU on pre-med, not the sympathetic, sad one. Quinn swallows and looks up to him, her eyes sliding over his wrinkled face. He's only just turned 54, and he looks great for his age, but the wrinkles are clear to Quinn. She's known him since she was five, lived with him for two years before she moved for the big city with his daughter and her own daughter. "Let's eat."
"I'm not really hungry," she says, sighing, looking down at her salad and knowing intellectually that she is hungry. The disconnect from her head to her stomach is too far for her to manage. "Let's...go home."
//
Alex squeals happily when he sees her, his little arms stretching out towards Quinn from the safety of Haley (the elder's) arms. Haley doesn't look too frazzled with having had to take care of a eighteen-month-old and a sixteen year-old, and just smiles at Quinn easily, holding the little boy out to his mother. Quinn takes him, smiles a little when he immediately grabs for her hair, like he always does, his little fingers winding through it and tugging lightly, and kisses his small forehead before setting him on her hip. It had been an easy decision to have another child, and Alex was a rather well-adjusted child, making the decision even easier, in hindsight. But considering the fact that her wife was in a coma, unresponsive to the city that never sleeps buzzing around her...
Aaron smiles down at Alex, poking him in the nose and running his hand over the dark brown hair that's been present on his head since his birth, thanks to his genetic ancestry in Rachel and Puck (who had quite lecherously and happily agreed to be the sperm donor, saying something about fathering both of Quinn's kids, and how the first one had been much more fun to make). Haley (the younger) came bouncing out of her room and made a lunge for Michael, squealing happily at their appearance. Michael and Aaron lived north of the city, and came down pretty often, but Haley acted just like her mother when something mundane made her happy.
Haley (the elder) steps closer to Quinn and hugs her loosely, and Quinn sets her head on her cousin's shoulder thankfully. She feels like she could sleep for days, but she's a little afraid to close her eyes. Haley seems to catch that thought and steps back, taking Alex back from Quinn and gesturing for Quinn to go to bed. No one says a word against it, and Haley (the younger) hugs Quinn tightly before whispering, "Just go to sleep, mom," and Quinn goes to her bedroom after whispered assurances from Haley, other Haley, and her fathers-in-law that they'll go out to dinner and it'll be fine if Quinn goes to sleep for a little bit. Alex makes a noise of contentment when Quinn kisses the top of his head and slowly steps into her bedroom.
Her entire life lays around the room, reflecting back at her everything she has to lose. Comas are complicated things, Quinn knows. Chances are 50/50, and no matter how high the fall, there's no true way to figure which side of the coin you're getting. Quinn knows all these things, but she's afraid to know them, afraid to think them, because it's always different when it's someone else in that hospital bed, anyone but her wife, the love of her life.
On Rachel's nightstand, there are only two pictures. One of them is of Quinn holding Haley, in her toothless, baby days. She had been seventeen and she had a daughter and a girlfriend, somehow, and her life had seemed perfect, and the look on her younger, smiling face reflected that. The second picture was from just last year, a picture of the entire family, with Haley holding a squirming Alex and Rachel with her arm wrapped around her daughter and Quinn with her hand in Rachel's leftover one, smiling down at her family. Her life had seemed pretty perfect then, too.
On the mantle over their fireplace was their life, from Rachel's first Tony, to Quinn's medical grants, to their wedding certificate. The newest addition had been Rachel's Golden Globe, for a role in a movie that she had managed to gather huge admirers for. She had all the others - Emmy, Grammy, and Tony - all that was left was the Oscar. They had already got the invitation in the mail. And Rachel had been ecstatic, jumping around the apartment and squealing while Quinn had stood in the center of their living room, staring down at the little gold card inviting Mrs. Rachel Berry and a guest to the Kodak Theater of Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremonies. And now...the ceremony was in a month and a half, and now, maybe Rachel would finally achieve her lifelong dream, from a hospital bed, or worse.
Quinn sits on the queen-sized bed and wonders how she's even supposed to sleep. She and Rachel had broken up once in the entirety of their relationship, for a terrible, terrible week in the middle of their sophomore year of college, for some stupid-ass reason that neither of them remembered by the time they made up. It wasn't an obligatory thing - it wasn't about the responsibilities they had to Haley, they loved each other and couldn't stand to be away from each other. Quinn was only thirty-two, she didn't have hardly any wrinkles, and suddenly, this was happening to her.
She slips her shoes off and tucks herself under the covers, automatically rolling towards Rachel's side of the bed, where she'd usually set her head on the smaller woman's shoulder, if she was really just interested in sleep that night. Except, there's nothing there, and all Quinn gets is her face crashing into the bed, smelling so much of Rachel that Quinn doesn't move away, just breathes it in.
With the smell of her wife all around her, she finally manages to fall asleep.
Rating: PG-13
Length: 3000
Spoilers: everything up to Laryngitis
Summary: Quinn's life is changing once again.
Author's Note: So, hey, do you remember the Love Story verse? Well, here's the newest addition to it. I should warn you, though, it isn't light and fluffy. It falls in the same timeline, but it's tone is completely different. And maybe you will cry. I hope you have your tissues :D And enjoy the first part! Also, I know I'm in the middle of Quinn Fabray and the Questionable Sweaters of Rachel Berry, but this just came at me and I couldn't stop myself.
Quinn gets the call in the middle of an appointment. She's just finishing up telling a kid that his shots won't turn his skin green or anything, and that they're nothing to be afraid of, and then her secretary is barging into the room, frantic, with Quinn's usually locked-up cell phone grasped in her hand.
Quinn has never felt more afraid in her entire life as when she looks over at the kid quickly, this kid who's been crying for the last five minutes over getting his tetanus shot and the phone that clearly displays a call from NYU Medical Center's Emergency Room, because her secretary looks pleading and wild-eyed, and she doesn't ever get a call from the hospital unless it's one of her patients who's in intensive care.
Her heart wrenches in her chest and twists around, and she apologizes quickly to the mother of the child and takes the phone, telling the other doctor at her practice to get the kid to take his damn shots and then she says, "Hello," into the phone, like her entire life isn't waiting on the other side.
"Dr. Fabray? It's Kevin, down at the NYU ER - I guess you already knew that. But your wife - "
And that is all Quinn needs to know to throw her lab coat off her and at her desk chair, grabbing her purse and laptop case and rushing out of the building, trying to ignore the pounding in her head.
She takes the subway - that's how she gets to work every day, and the bus would take too long - but it feels like forever, transferring from the red line to the yellow to the green and sprinting out of the station at 33rd street. She grabs the first college kid she sees and flashes her badge - she's a consulting physician at the hospital and gets perks like an office she never uses - and makes them have a walk and talk about how Quinn Fabray is in the building and how she needs to see Rachel's current ER physician the minute he finds the time to pull his head out of his ass and realize that Quinn fucking Fabray is here. She drops the poor attending after she pushes through the ER doors with a flourish, dropping her laptop case at the nurse's station and following a wordless nurse's pointing to room thirteen.
The sight she is greeted with upon entry is not promising. Rachel is hooked up to an IV and what looks like the beginnings of a morphine drip, and her face is scraped all along the right side. It's terrifying, and Quinn can't even feel her hands as she steps up to the hospital bed and drapes her fingers over the edge.
She doesn't even quite know what happened, Kevin had just told her that Rachel was here, and unconscious, and that it looked bad and that absolutely terrified her. It should, actually, because Rachel had been her girlfriend since the tail end of their sophomore year and they had been married for ten years and the only time Rachel's ever been in the ER was last year when Alex had been born, and even then, it had literally been for the five seconds it took for Quinn to say that her wife was in labor and that they needed to get to the OB unit in the fastest transfer the entire hospital had ever undertaken.
Rachel was also knocked the hell out, and judging by the lack of people in the room besides Quinn, no one was going to be able to tell Quinn what had really happened until the attending physician got into the room.
She watches as her wife shifts just a tiny bit in her sleep, before she makes a small sound, her hand twitching too little for it to be just sleep. Quinn can't even breathe. She grabs at the charts at the end of the bed, and the information greeting her is not comforting, still. It had been a fall from a set, up higher than Rachel probably should've been or would've been if Quinn had anything to do with it. She had hit the ground and had been out like a light ever since. It was already written in that she had a concussion, although a blind person could've probably determined that.
"Ah, Dr. Fabray, I heard you were here."
Quinn doesn't drop the charts, just clenches them in her hands and looks up to the familiar visage of the director of the entire unit, Dr. Jansen. She doesn't bother to shake his hand, just nods and looks back down to the chart and the familiar numbers and names and information that Quinn's learned over the years, down to the pistachios that Rachel is allergic to. This cannot be happening.
Dr. Jansen steps a little closer to her, not encroaching on her space, just surveys her.
"Maybe you should put the charts down, Quinn," he says softly, because Quinn is flipping from the preliminary chart to the information page and she knows what's happening and it kills.
She doesn't hand the clipboard over, just clenches it tighter in her already too-pale hands, leaning forward a little and bracing herself on the end of the bed, staring down the linen sheets to her wife, who should really be at home and preparing to get Haley. And God, Quinn needs to call Haley, who's sixteen and is probably flipping out that Rachel isn't home right now, because sixteen year olds know how to flip the fuck out on a grand scale.
"When is she getting moved?" Quinn asks, dropping the chart into its holder and moving over to the side of the bed not accompanied by the two drips and sliding her fingers over Rachel's hand. It doesn't move, doesn't react, and Quinn just knows.
Dr. Jansen watches her for a moment longer, and frowns.
"Whenever her attending deems her stable. I'm sorry this has happened, Quinn - "
"I don't really want to hear this speech from the other end, Dr. Jansen. I need to...call my daughter so she can go pick up her brother at daycare," Quinn whispers, running her fingers over Rachel's hand and hoping against hope that she's wrong and that this isn't happening.
Dr. Jansen leaves as quickly as he came.
//
Quinn hates the ICU. She doesn't go up there often - it's like death is just stalking the corridors and she can't deal that well with it. It hurts way worse, of course, when she's having to take one of her kids down to the children's ICU, but she doesn't usually have to.
Rachel's room is small and it's clean and it's a good room - Quinn knows it's the biggest one on the unit because she knows this hospital like the back of her hand, and she knows it's no mistake that her wife is the one occupying the room. She isn't hooked up to ventilator, thank the lord, because Quinn probably couldn't be able to stand it if her usually vibrant and verbose wife was being forced to breathe by a machine. Dr. Allen, down in ER had already handed Rachel off, after she was completely unresponsive to all stimuli.
The worst part about this whole mess was that Rachel didn't have much else going on. Facial lacerations and some stitches along her hairline, and a broken wrist, and a possible hematoma on her leg. Nothing else. Just...this.
Quinn can't even breathe, so she just sits down in the chair in the far corner of the room and watches her wife breathe in and out, in and out. That's better than she can do.
//
Haley doesn't get into the building until around seven at night, and Quinn hears her coming from halfway across the unit. Her daughter is too much like her mothers - both of them - and has inherited Rachel's penchant for being excitable and being loud about it, and Quinn's ability to make others fear her with simple looks and barely veiled threats.
Haley stops in the doorway of the room, panting a little, her fingers clutching her lanyard tightly. She looks from Rachel on the bed, breathing slowly and not moving to Quinn in the chair, legs crossed up under her and eyes glued to her daughter. Quinn can't quite tell what's going on in her daughter's head, because her jaw is clenching and unclenching, but she has enough presence of mind to step back outside the room and get antibacterial foam from the dispenser right outside before she steps back in and looks back down at Rachel.
"What happened?" she finally asks, looking over at Quinn. For the first time, Quinn can see the shiny quality of her hazel eyes, too bright for it to be normal. Quinn doesn't say anything, just slides out of her chair and stands up, moving over to her wife's bedside, beckoning their daughter closer.
"She fell off a set," Quinn mutters, reaching for Rachel's hand and frowning sadly when she sees the morphine and IV drips up at the bend of her elbow. "She hasn't woken up since."
Haley steps a little closer to Quinn, and Quinn wraps her arm around the girl, reeling her in. She watches as Rachel's heart rate monitor continues on and she feels Haley drop her head under Quinn's chin, unintentionally mimicking Rachel's usual positioning.
"She's in a coma," Haley whispers, her smaller hand sliding down to worm under Quinn's and over Rachel's. Quinn doesn't have the heart to say yes, so she just nods a little. Haley sinks in her embrace a little more.
//
She doesn't go home the first night. The hour-long shift change is brutal, and after she sends Haley to the other Haley's house, she commandeers a couch in the ICU waiting room and tries to ignore all the other sad-looking people in the room. She doesn't sleep, either, just stares into the darkness until they let her back in.
She spends the rest of the night at Rachel's bedside, watching nurses come in and out and checking machines and Rachel's charts every forty-five minutes, right on schedule. She knows, intellectually, that she is probably in the way, and that she's torturing herself by sitting here and expecting something extraordinary to happen. She went to medical school, she's seen people in comas before, she knows what the rates are and what all this could mean for her, for her life.
Quinn doesn't quite know what her life would be without Rachel. She's known the woman her entire life, she's been with her for a little over half of it, and she doesn't know what her life even looks like with Rachel in it. She's her wife, her partner, her best friend. And she was in a coma, and Quinn remembers all the stuff she absorbed in her neurology class downtown, and she remembers the facts and the numbers and she knows that this could go sideways eighteen ways to Sunday.
Michael and Aaron get there on the second day Rachel is in the hospital, and they drag her out to lunch. Or, they drag her down to the hospital cafeteria where she blearily scans her badge for all three of their meals, and stares at her already slim meal with contempt. Michael watches her watch her food, before he gently pokes at her shoulder.
"Quinnie, honey," he says, sounding too sad for it to really be Michael. Michael was supposed to be the dad who took her to an adult toy store the day she got accepted to NYU on pre-med, not the sympathetic, sad one. Quinn swallows and looks up to him, her eyes sliding over his wrinkled face. He's only just turned 54, and he looks great for his age, but the wrinkles are clear to Quinn. She's known him since she was five, lived with him for two years before she moved for the big city with his daughter and her own daughter. "Let's eat."
"I'm not really hungry," she says, sighing, looking down at her salad and knowing intellectually that she is hungry. The disconnect from her head to her stomach is too far for her to manage. "Let's...go home."
//
Alex squeals happily when he sees her, his little arms stretching out towards Quinn from the safety of Haley (the elder's) arms. Haley doesn't look too frazzled with having had to take care of a eighteen-month-old and a sixteen year-old, and just smiles at Quinn easily, holding the little boy out to his mother. Quinn takes him, smiles a little when he immediately grabs for her hair, like he always does, his little fingers winding through it and tugging lightly, and kisses his small forehead before setting him on her hip. It had been an easy decision to have another child, and Alex was a rather well-adjusted child, making the decision even easier, in hindsight. But considering the fact that her wife was in a coma, unresponsive to the city that never sleeps buzzing around her...
Aaron smiles down at Alex, poking him in the nose and running his hand over the dark brown hair that's been present on his head since his birth, thanks to his genetic ancestry in Rachel and Puck (who had quite lecherously and happily agreed to be the sperm donor, saying something about fathering both of Quinn's kids, and how the first one had been much more fun to make). Haley (the younger) came bouncing out of her room and made a lunge for Michael, squealing happily at their appearance. Michael and Aaron lived north of the city, and came down pretty often, but Haley acted just like her mother when something mundane made her happy.
Haley (the elder) steps closer to Quinn and hugs her loosely, and Quinn sets her head on her cousin's shoulder thankfully. She feels like she could sleep for days, but she's a little afraid to close her eyes. Haley seems to catch that thought and steps back, taking Alex back from Quinn and gesturing for Quinn to go to bed. No one says a word against it, and Haley (the younger) hugs Quinn tightly before whispering, "Just go to sleep, mom," and Quinn goes to her bedroom after whispered assurances from Haley, other Haley, and her fathers-in-law that they'll go out to dinner and it'll be fine if Quinn goes to sleep for a little bit. Alex makes a noise of contentment when Quinn kisses the top of his head and slowly steps into her bedroom.
Her entire life lays around the room, reflecting back at her everything she has to lose. Comas are complicated things, Quinn knows. Chances are 50/50, and no matter how high the fall, there's no true way to figure which side of the coin you're getting. Quinn knows all these things, but she's afraid to know them, afraid to think them, because it's always different when it's someone else in that hospital bed, anyone but her wife, the love of her life.
On Rachel's nightstand, there are only two pictures. One of them is of Quinn holding Haley, in her toothless, baby days. She had been seventeen and she had a daughter and a girlfriend, somehow, and her life had seemed perfect, and the look on her younger, smiling face reflected that. The second picture was from just last year, a picture of the entire family, with Haley holding a squirming Alex and Rachel with her arm wrapped around her daughter and Quinn with her hand in Rachel's leftover one, smiling down at her family. Her life had seemed pretty perfect then, too.
On the mantle over their fireplace was their life, from Rachel's first Tony, to Quinn's medical grants, to their wedding certificate. The newest addition had been Rachel's Golden Globe, for a role in a movie that she had managed to gather huge admirers for. She had all the others - Emmy, Grammy, and Tony - all that was left was the Oscar. They had already got the invitation in the mail. And Rachel had been ecstatic, jumping around the apartment and squealing while Quinn had stood in the center of their living room, staring down at the little gold card inviting Mrs. Rachel Berry and a guest to the Kodak Theater of Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremonies. And now...the ceremony was in a month and a half, and now, maybe Rachel would finally achieve her lifelong dream, from a hospital bed, or worse.
Quinn sits on the queen-sized bed and wonders how she's even supposed to sleep. She and Rachel had broken up once in the entirety of their relationship, for a terrible, terrible week in the middle of their sophomore year of college, for some stupid-ass reason that neither of them remembered by the time they made up. It wasn't an obligatory thing - it wasn't about the responsibilities they had to Haley, they loved each other and couldn't stand to be away from each other. Quinn was only thirty-two, she didn't have hardly any wrinkles, and suddenly, this was happening to her.
She slips her shoes off and tucks herself under the covers, automatically rolling towards Rachel's side of the bed, where she'd usually set her head on the smaller woman's shoulder, if she was really just interested in sleep that night. Except, there's nothing there, and all Quinn gets is her face crashing into the bed, smelling so much of Rachel that Quinn doesn't move away, just breathes it in.
With the smell of her wife all around her, she finally manages to fall asleep.