Glee: Home 1/5 (Quinn)

[lexie-b.livejournal.com]

Title: Home 1/5
Author: Lexie
Characters: Quinn Fabray
Word Count: 488
Rating: PG
Genre: Gen
Summary: The year Quinn Fabray was sixteen, she had four and a half homes.
Notes: This is my first posted Glee fic, so I'll ask you to be gentle. I wanted to explore Quinn's position in season one – how awful it must have been for her to be cast out of her home and then continually moving from place to place. Please note that the fourth chapter will have spoilers for Funk, and the fifth for Journey. I hope you enjoy this.
Disclaimer: The characters of Glee belong to Ryan Murphy and Fox. I make not profit from this fan-based venture.


One.
She wants to hurt someone, to scream at them until they step up and become the parents she needs. But those parents are not the ones she has; they're just a figment of her imagination – the tiny chink in the armour that she has built up around herself since that terrible, terrible test came out positive.

So she steels herself and sweeps past her father as he sneers at her and sets the microwave timer.

Standing in her bedroom, she was rather at a loss. How do you pack up your life in thirty minutes? How do you know what you'll want, what you'll need?

She finds her set of luggage –power pink with her monogram stamped in the corner – in the top of her wardrobe and throws them onto her bed.

She is practical at first – clothes, school books, toiletries... she is ultra calm as she folds her elastic-waisted skirts next to flat shoes and baby-doll blouses.

And then, then she suddenly gets angry. Angry that she has to discard her life because her parents are too narrow minded, too weak to accept her mistake. Wasn't that what parents were meant to do? To pick you up when you fell, to hold and protect you from whatever demons cross your path?

She's almost finished packing now. If nothing else, she's a smart girl, and it doesn't take much intelligence to tuck her jewellery box underneath her folded sweaters (the diamond bracelet from when she made Cheerios captain; golden pearls she wore to her sister's wedding... her grandmother's watch) – things she could sell, if she could bring herself to part with them.

It's surprising how much she fitted into her suitcases – or how few things her life is made up of.

But she has one last thing to do before she leaves.

The master bedroom swallows most of the second floor, and she's never felt more obvious slipping through the double doors and heading to her mother's dressing table. In the top right drawer, her mother keeps cash in an envelope, underneath her planner. It takes nothing to pull open the drawer and slip the envelope out, folding it and slipping it into the waistband of her skirt.

It should feel wrong, really. Stealing from her parents when they've given her everything; that was her sister's shtick. But then they turned this into a struggle for survival and Quinn Fabray has never been one to fall below the food chain.

She hears the timer of the microwave counting down the last sixty seconds and closes the drawer.

Before she leaves, she pauses at the two photographs on the dressing table – Quinn and her sister, eight years apart.

It doesn't feel like her hand as she reaches out and picks up the photograph of her – fourteen and smiling, nothing but happiness and security in her life. That Quinn Fabray knew her place in the world.

She misses that feeling.