['You are always scared, always fractured, always broken and this is beautiful but you are also entirely convinced, at this point, of sutures, because your chest is held together by their remnants and your lungs are constantly cracking around the lack.' or, five times quinn's heart breaks (& one time it doesn't). faberry headcanon drabble.]

a dead sea of memory, in which all too many associations inexorably flow (history is written in blood)

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in both cases what i was insisting was: 'i may allow myself to do this'…
—sigmund freud, the interpretation of dreams

…

(This is true.

You are very good at breaking your heart.)

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1

You have wanted to kiss her since you were fourteen, and then again since six months ago, since she held your hand again when she'd visited the second week of your senior year.

Sometimes you are convinced that you have wanted to kiss Rachel Berry for your whole life.

It is February, and it always aches more in February. You are always scared, always fractured, always broken and this is beautiful but you are also entirely convinced, at this point, of sutures, because your chest is held together by their remnants and your lungs are constantly cracking around the lack.

Rachel is solid. Rachel had taken you to dinner at your favorite Indian place in New Haven. Rachel had had masala and chai. Rachel had fit her body into yours on the walk back to your apartment. She'd tucked the newly-short strands of your hair back behind your ears. She'd sat on your bed.

Rachel looks down at your lips twice, then flickers up to your eyes.

'Is this okay,' you whisper, practically into her mouth, because you believe wholeheartedly in verbal consent.

She moans hot and low and quiet against your teeth, and then she fists a hand in hair and because it's shorter she seems to tug harder.

It's all sublime paradoxes, the hungry need of you everywhere: her lips are softer than you could ever remember, and she tastes like rosewater and spice and salt.

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2

It will hit you your spring term last year at Yale while Rachel's legs are tangled with yours and you're reading Lacan for the nth time: This fragmented body usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs.

The nightmares are not always congruent but they often include broken legs and belts.

You cannot make them go away, because when you woke up after your accident it was snowing, drifting aching bright against your eyes that have been closed for too long. Your head hurt. Your legs didn't.

You remember. You always remember the snow.

'Rachel,' you say, 'baby,' and you are near tears when she looks up at you from where she was tracing lazy patterns up and down your abs. You put down your lit theory anthology—in ways it has replaced your Bible—and you kiss her. Everything drifts outside, but she holds you—down, here, up—and you know the death of the small self beautifully.

The nightmares don't go away, but your body, now, is a bit more put-together.

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3

Beth wants to go on the bumper cars. There are so many specters that haunt you and here are about four of them, presenting themselves in broad daylight in spring.

It's just the two of you today, and Beth is nine, so like you as this sort of hybrid Lucy/Quinn, and your mind always spins at the implications of who you might've been if you'd been fragmented less early on, because Beth is well-adjusted and articulate and she looks startlingly like Frannie, except for her eyes, which are yours.

So you say, 'Yes,' because you are not in the habit of not being brave. Not anymore.

You strap yourself into the rickety metal car and you laugh because some very dismal Lacan runs through your head for a moment—inversion, isolation, splitting, negation, and displacement—and Beth grins at you, squealing with delight, when the cars rumble to life.

You're on the edge of a panic attack the entire time, and she seems to have this intuitive connection to you so she doesn't ask to ride again, only if you can go get some ice-cream, and she holds your violently trembling hand without a word when you climb out.

You ache all over in the unlanguaged way, because she's one of the most whole people you know.

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4

Rachel teases you because you quote Badiou in your vows—love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world—but later, after you've had champagne among the shimmering lights and whispering moths and stars, in your hotel room, Rachel says, 'We have,' and you nod, and then she adds, 'We triumphed.'

It makes you laugh for a brief moment and you say, 'I know, Mrs. Berry-Fabray.'

It breaks your heart to say it aloud like this, naked, entirely exposed, and it does it in the achiest, most beautiful way: your entire body—nerve-damaged legs, mended skull, scar-tissued lungs and all—sinks into the ecstasy.

Later you want to quote something about how love is the dissolution of self-identification because of the joining with another body. You want to because you are literally, quite physically, in love with Rachel.

But her fingers and tongue stretch and press inside you, and you rock and earthquake around her, and there are no words for jouissance anyway.

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5

It's syllabus day for your favorite class to teach—Musical Theatre and Performance Theory—because it involves about half of a semester over queer performativity and corporeality through a lens of simulation and simulacra, and you stand in front of this small group of, you assume, very bright kids, and say, 'I'm Dr. Berry-Fabray, and if you're not here for the right class leave now and we'll save our laughter for after your exit.'

They laugh, and no one leaves, and you stand straight and unrelenting in your favorite perfectly tailored Helmut Lang suit and Louboutins, and go through the basics of your course.

They introduce themselves, and there's a part of you that loves your job so much because there is some strange, incredible reconciliation between shy, bibliophile Lucy and intimidating, powerful Quinn. You brush aside your bangs and take a deep breath and introduce yourself, and you are at once self-effacing and proud, because, right now, you have made something really, really great with your troubled, troubled brain.

You make sure to hold your cup of coffee with your left hand—there's a stain of pink lipstick on the lid, and your wedding band shines gold in the light, and there are moments when you think that this is one of the most complete parts of your existence.

It's a paradox because it jolts your chest, but you are so, so wonderfully comfortable here, and you conclude your first class with a brief lecture about some key terms that they'll need to know for the readings for next class, and after class a boy who reminds you in some Midwestern, determined way of Kurt walks next to you as you're leaving the building and says, 'This is so cool.'

You smile—sincerely—and you say, 'It really, really is.'

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6

Nora asks about your scars one day when she comes into your room without knocking and you haven't put your shirt on yet. You know she's seen them before because you've been swimming and she's seen you in a sports bra and once she walked in on you and Rachel when she'd had a nightmare—Rachel had been pushing you up against the wall, her front pressed against your back, and thankfully her hands were still on your breasts and you both still had t-shirts and underwear on; Nora hadn't really been phased—and she's looked at the marks strangely but she'd always been too young.

But she's five, and it's jamais vu when she looks at you pointedly and says, 'Mom, where did those scars come from?'

She looks like Rachel. She looks so much like Rachel, twisting her long brown hair between her small fingers nervously—uncanny, you think—and you almost start to cry.

But you are her mom. She is your child.

You button your blouse and sit on your bed, and she crawls up and plops ungracefully on your lap. You don't want to lie, and you've gone through this conversation a million times in your head and with Rachel and with your therapist. 'When I was little, my dad used to hurt me,' you tell her, and her eyes grow big. 'He hit me with a belt.'

Nora's eyes grow so big. 'Why?' she breathes.

Your breath hitches, and for the first time in your life, the weight against your legs—this being Rachel made, this autonomous lovely existence—doesn't break your heart.

'I don't know, Nora,' you say.

She tucks her head into the space between her chest, and you kiss her soft hair that smells like coconuts—she wanted shampoo that smelled like 'yours and Mommy's'—and you feel her tears against your skin.

Your child pulls you together then, pulls together your fragmented self while you start to cry too, and neither of you say anything for a long while, until Rachel gets home from playgroup with Oliver and calls out a hello.

This is true.

It's your favorite thing: you hurt the most, despite everything that has ever happened to you, that you cannot language how much love your heart holds.

Nora sucks in a breath and drags her little hands along your cheeks with a smile that demolishes you, heals you, exquisitely.