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seriousficTitle: Under peaceful conditions, the warlike attack themselves
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,081
Characters/Pairings: Rachel/Quinn, Santana/Brittany
Previous: Part 9
Summary: For Rachel, being in love is all questions, no answers.
Quinn remembered the way to the nerve center of the city's underground transit system from a case she'd worked involving subway pirates. There'd been cops camped out with coffee and donuts then too. Detective Goolsby and Inspector Cochoran were already there, surveying maps.
"Evening, Shelby," Quinn greeted warmly. They'd worked together on the Sunshine Corazon kidnapping. She'd always admired Shelby's MILF status. Not everyone aged so gracefully.
"The Cheerio!" Goolsby shouted. He was tough, hard, and about 5'2.
"Bonus points to my publicist," Quinn retorted.
Goolsby looked around at all the cops snapping pictures on their phones. "Someone arrest this clown!"
"Oh, Goolsby, I just can't take you seriously when I feel like you should start every sentence with 'Oompa loompa doompadee doo.'" Quinn dropped down next to Shelby. "Where's the Reptile?"
Goolsby puffed up. "My SWAT boys are flushing him out as we speak. We're have him within the hour."
"You've been saying that for the last four hours," Shelby commented.
"And it's a she," Quinn added. "I'm going after her. You can help me or not, but I know how to find her and how to stop her."
"The city of New York does not endorse vigilantism," Goolsby said primly.
"Listen, Tyrion, I loved you in Game of Thrones, but this is sci-fi, not fantasy. Butt out."
"Fine, I'll do it myself." Goolsby pulled out his handcuffs. "I am placing you under arrest—"
"Sergeant!" Shelby barked. "Why don't you go give a status update to the Mayor? I'm sure he'd like to know who's joined the search."
***
The subway map was a Gordian knot of red, blue, and orange lines going through the boroughs like veins. Shelby tapped on one of them. "Alright, this is the only electrical connection anywhere near open water. It's like an underwater cave."
"Why didn't they shut the power off?" Quinn asked.
"I don't know. Politics or something. No one ever used the thing, it was a drain of about a half-watt every decade. Why go to the trouble of fixing it? It's called the Astor Tunnels. Over a century ago, Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, and a bunch of other rich bastards built a private railcar line. Came down from Pelham, under the Park, beneath the Knickerbocker Hotel, the Fifth Avenue parkfront mansions. Fancy private stations and waiting rooms. The deepest excavation in the history of New York."
"What, were they looking for oil?"
"Geology. Had to go deeper than the existing train lines and early subway tunnels. But right below is a layer of rotten Precambrian siltstone, so they had to go deeper. Thirty stories deeper. With those deep tunnels, they could go straight out of the city, come up around Croton, and be on their way. No delay, no mixing with the common folk."
"Why were they abandoned? CHUDs?"
"Worse. Maintenance. Beneath most of the sewer and storm like they were, you could never keep them dry. Then there was methane buildup, carbon monoxide, you name it."
Quinn remembered that from her science class. "Heavy gases seeking the lowest level."
Shelby nodded. "They spent millions on those damn tunnels. Never finished the line. They were only open for two years before the flood of ninety-eight overwhelmed the pumps and flooded the place. So they bricked everything up. Didn't even pull out the machinery."
"Then that's where she'll be."
"How can you be sure?" St. James piped up, holding up the bag Quinn had asked for. Inside was everything she needed to navigate the tunnels.
Quinn grabbed the bag from him. "She needs power to run the machine and having it only accessible from the water makes it easy to defend. She's a monster, not stupid. If you didn't have me, how would you get her out of there?"
St. James conceded the point with a shrug.
Shelby pulled Quinn inside, talked to her as Quinn looked through her things. She'd asked for three flashlights and she checked all of them to make sure they worked.
"Can you beat it?" Shelby asked.
"Why would I go down there if I couldn't?"
"Goolsby asked the Mayor for permission to pump the area full of cyanide gas. God help us if any of it leaks out, but that's our only other play."
"It won't come to that."
"Great. I'd hate to waste good cyanide."
***
Rachel didn't know where else to go.
After befriending Quinn, Finn's hospital room seemed colder and starker somehow. Rachel hugged herself after she set down a bouquet of flowers. She'd never brought any before, but today seemed like it needed it.
"Hi!" she greeted Finn, throwing her whole arm into a wave. "It must seem like we forgot you exist. Sorry about that. Things have exuberated… things have gotten pretty exuberated lately…"
The flowers at Finn's bedside were wilted. Quinn's. Rachel picked them up, found one or two that still had life in them, and added them to her own vase. It was purple. Just one more bit of color for the white hospital room. It seemed like the hospital was designed to dry out color. Even Finn's clothes were white now, and he was getting so pale…
"Did you know about Quinn?" Rachel asked. "About her… day job? Yeah, I bet she told you. She must've told you everything. You two must really have been in love, because she is so lost without you."
The chair next to his bed always squeaked when she pulled it over to sit down. Rachel liked to cry, she was good at it, but she sniffled and resisted the tears this time. They seemed cheap now, like she had no right to them. "What's happening, Finn? Just when we're pulling everything together, it seems like everything's tearing us apart. You're a good person, what could you have possibly done to deserve this? There are supervillains and corruption and now monsters and I just can't tell what's going on, what's wrong with the world. I miss you. I miss... I miss not having to care. What was so bad about the way things used to be? Are things going to get better? And how did you survive it, knowing she was out there and she could die? She could die, Finn. Why does she have to be out there? Why's she the only one who can do these things? It's not fair. I know life isn't fair, but something should be. She deserves it."
Rachel stood. She was so worked up all of a sudden. She rubbed her arms, trying to warm them up. Maybe it really was cold in there. "But I guess someone has to do it. I'm glad it's someone like Quinn. Even if I wish it were anyone else. Thanks for listening. If I find her... I'll take care of her. I promise."
***
Quinn was thirty stories down. Water dripped down into the subway tunnel, echoing along with her footsteps across monumental archways that gave way to naves as big as Notre Dame.
She scoured her flashlight over a shantytown: cardboard walls, electrical wiring, elaborate debris kitchens. The walls were infested with messages, everything from "Kilroy was here" to elaborate poetry, written around crude graffiti. The latest depicted various reptiles. No wonder it was abandoned.
Up ahead, the tunnel was bricked over. The wall had been completely covered with graffiti, like the old inhabitants were a primitive tribe paying homage to a god. Quinn supposed you didn't live in a subway if you were the kind of person who got freaked out by one giant lizard.
Summoning up all her strength, she banged her fist against the wall. It held. And attracted attention. A voice shivered through the wall.
"Who is it?" Brittany asked.
"You're not Santana… who's in there?"
"It's me… Brittany S. Pierce."
"The Reptile kidnapped Britney Spears?"
"No… that's a common mistake. My name's spelled B-R-I-T-T-N-Y."
"Oh. Good. I was thinking of leaving you here." Quinn looked up to see a crack in the wall. It wasn't big enough for her, but she wondered if the Reptile could've slithered through it. Shooting a ribbon up like a grappling hook, she climbed up to look through it.
The abandoned subway station was like Grand Central's dead little brother. It was obvious that there was a time that the cavernous space had glistened with immense Gothic statuary, tile mosaics, and decorative arches. Now it was a frozen maelstrom of twisting cast iron trusses, broken steam pipes, fragmented scaffolding and hanging cables. Cracked mannequin faces stared out from a tailor shop with its sign eternally turned to CLOSED. A flower parlor had replaced its roses with cobwebs. A group of abandoned turn-of-the-century subway cars decayed on parallel tracks. Glimmering debris littered the floor--cans, eyeglasses, chrome, foil, glass shards, broken watches... even gold teeth.
"Brittany?" Quinn called. "Where are you?"
That's when Quinn saw the machine. A spidery assembly of parts, it sat above a pit in the floor. Cables sprawled out from it into other equipment, including one braided cord tapping into the city's power. And above it, Brittany was inside a cage.
A rattle filled the air, ominously jangling like war drums. Quinn followed the noise to the far side of the station as the Reptile emerged from the shadows.
Its back had sprouted armor plates like a Stegosaurus's, and a cobra's massive hood surrounded its horned head, while its snout had grown out into a crocodile's maw.
"What are you doing to her?" Quinn demanded.
"Making her the first of many." Horribly, the Reptile's vocal cords had fit into its new body, now letting out its human voice from monstrous teeth. "When I'm done, she'll rule by my side. Cold. Logical. Reptilian."
"I don't want to be a lizard," Brittany protested. "I'd eat flies and I think they have a lot of calories."
The Reptile hissed as it threw a lever all the way from one end of its arc to the other, turning the machine on. A ray of light shot down the pit and into the water, which churned and bubbled. Steam rose up to billow around it.
"Soon…" It looked up at Quinn, its eyes kicking back light like an animal's. "Leave now, cheerleader. Turn away and enjoy what time you have left before I use my machine on the water supply. Humanity is about to become an evolutionary dead-end."
Quinn hit the wall until even her impervious knuckles stung, but all it got her was a dent the size of a dinner plate. Someone grabbed her shoulder. When she turned, Finn was there.
"Please. Don't do this. I don't want you to die."
Quinn massaged the knuckles of her hand. "You're not real," she said, not quite sure if she wished she were lying or not.
"You wouldn't leave me alone, would you?"
Quinn's fingers clenched. "Finn, do me a favor. Don't watch. I'll see you soon."
***
The police didn't ask many questions when Quinn told them she needed their help to rewire the track. In no time at all, with no warning at all, the train was lurching forward. Wheels sparked and kicked into gear; rusting, creaking, the train groaned down the tracks. Quinn was right there with it. One last chance to have a purpose.
She'd known, intellectually, on a level Finn could never appreciate, that she'd lose sometime. You didn't have to be great at math to know statistics. No one could win forever. So, the only thing that mattered was how you looked when the cards came up a dead man's hand. Did you frown, did you close your eyes, did you whimper in fear? Or did you grin and bear it?
Quinn had a smile on her face. A small one, but nonetheless genuine. She wasn't afraid at all. Just tired. She finally understood why all the ancient warriors wanted to die in battle. At the last moment, at the bitter end, there was no more rage for the dying of the light. There was a kind of peace. A kind of hope.
Something Quinn could savor.
The train hit the wall and burst through, derailing, scraping along the floor in morass of kicked-up stone and sheared-away sparks. It was headed right for the Reptile. It hissed and turned, only for its tail to knock the train aside. The train screeched away into the drop-off that let the original flood waters in, falling over the edge with a suddenly ghastly silence. Then came the muted sound of its hit and the slow music of it sinking.
"Nice save," Quinn said.
the Reptile turned, just realizing that Quinn wasn't in the train as the blonde swung into it at full speed. They soared over the chasm and into the opposite wall, hitting and making a crater the size of a pool. Quinn backflipped away and landed on dry land, while the Reptile, dazed, hung from its armor plates embedded in the wall. the Reptile tore itself loose and hit the water. Quinn looked down to see the ripples of her impact disappearing amidst the bubbles leaking up from the sunken train.
"Let's get this over with."
Then the water exploded, the Reptile breaching the surface like it was sprung from a coil. Quinn braced herself, but she still wasn't ready for how fast the Reptile was. The Reptile rammed into Quinn, carrying her into the air where the Reptile took hold of her and flung her down, into a fallen chandelier. The noise of its dusty glass cracking filled Quinn's ears. It was still twinkling when the Reptile stomped up to Quinn and ripped her out of the shattered glass. Quinn dangled from its grip, boots pumping a meter off the ground.
"I can smell your emotions. Love, fear, regret, happiness. Such confusion makes you weak!"
"Wanna know what makes you weak?" Quinn asked, holding a chandelier crystal up to the light. When the Reptile looked up at it, she buried the crystal in its eye. "No depth perception."
It let go of her and that was all the time she needed to juke to the left and pull rebar from a damaged pillar. She swung the bar into the Reptile's gut, screaming, yelling louder and louder with each hit until the length of rebar broke clean in two.
Quinn backed away, trying to think, as the Reptile pulled the crystal out. Her eye slitted shut, then opened, uninjured. Quinn was so dumbfounded that she dodged too late when the Reptile made its move—or maybe it just didn't matter. With a spurt of blood, claws slashed across her chest. Quinn's dodge ended in her hitting the floor, raked over the debris left by the subway train. The Reptile lunged, aiming to press her to the floor and gobble her down, but she caught it on top of her bended legs and then sprung her knees out, sending it flying. The Reptile flew up to hit the chandelier clasp holding up Brittany's cage. It gave way.
Quinn sprang into action, rolling to the side and coming up on one knee, throwing out a ribbon from her baton. It shot through the bars of the falling cage and hit the wall. Quickly, Quinn threw her baton up to embed in the wall, turning the ribbon into a clothesline and leaving the cage hanging.
As the Reptile attacked again, Brittany reached between the bars and grabbed the ribbon, pulling the cage along hand by hand.
A hand pressed painfully to the wound on her chest, Quinn kept one step ahead of the Reptile, leaping and dashing through the abandoned storefronts. Behind her, a runaway bulldozer couldn't have been more destructive. The Reptile pinned her down in the tailor shop, bearing her to the ground amidst scores of mannequin witnesses. Snarling, it put its foot to Quinn's head and pressed.
"Did you know you've got something stuck in your teeth?" Quinn asked, firing her second baton down its throat.
Gagging, the Reptile staggered back. Quinn grabbed it by the tail and swung it around, swiping through shelves, rushing up decayed scraps of cloth before letting go. The Reptile crashed through the storefront window and hit a pillar outside, shattering the base and rolling away. Quinn came out running, leapfrogged it, and kicked the rest of the pillar out.
"Timber," she quipped as it fell toward the Reptile. Who caught it. With a crack of her wrist, Quinn sent the tip of her ribbon across its eyes. It let go of the pillar, which cracked over its head. Quinn went in for more, but stumbled. When she got up, she saw an imprint of her blood on the floor.
The Reptile was watching her, its form whitened by the dust from the pillar. Quinn was soaked in her own blood. They breathed heavily, trying to pull back a little of what the fight had taken out of them. The eye of the hurricane.
Quinn charged. Screaming out all the rage, all the pain, everything in her life, she was on the Reptile, hammering it with lefts and rights so hard that you could hear stones rattling, a rapid-fire volley of hits that she put every last ounce of energy into and there was no way the Reptile could take it, no way in hell it could still be standing...
Quinn fell against it weakly, utterly exhausted, feebly trying to lay into it with a few pitiful blows. The Reptile bore them, tilting Quinn's chin up with one claw.
"You still have time for one last joke. The punchline better be a good one. Only God will hear it."
"Well, I know He has a sense of humor... since you're standing here."
The Reptile put its claw to the hollow of Quinn's throat and pushed, the razor-sharp tip just drawing blood…
Brittany had pulled the cage along Quinn's ribbon all the way to the wall, where the tip was buried. Putting one foot against the brick, she pulled on the ribbon with both hands until it came out. The cage dropped, air whistling through the bars, and hit the ground, breaking open.
The Reptile was distracted. And while it was distracted, Quinn grabbed its claw and buried it in its own belly.
"You don't want to feel anything?" Quinn demanded, bounding back up. "That can be arranged!"
She circled around the Reptile, leaping over the tail and landing in the armor plates, wedging her legs into them. Her fingers still slick with blood, she grabbed the Reptile's upper mandible in one hand and the lower mandible in his other. "Say ahh!" Pulling in opposite directions, she ignored the Reptile's flailing, didn't even notice when its claws drew blood from her thighs or arms. Finally, with a sharp crack, something gave.
Quinn pulled Mike Chang's vial from her boot. "It's your lucky day. The human race has one more opening, if you get your application in quick!" She popped the cork and poured it down the Reptile's throat.
The convulsions the Reptile went into finally threw Quinn off. Veins corded in its neck and desiccated scales peeled off to expose smaller, more flesh-toned ones. The snout shrunk like it was trying to go back into her face. Flecks of white appeared in her eyes...
"That's it, Lopez, fight it!" Quinn urged, winding her cape around her blood-smeared torso.
The armor plates dropped away and shattered on the floor like peanut brittle. Quinn stepped over them to put a hand on Santana's shoulder. It felt warm.
"Fight it…" Quinn begged.
"I am," the Reptile said as it swiped her away. Quinn flew back, into a wrecked piano, and didn't get up. The Reptile came up to drag her out of the nest of piano wires.
Quinn laughed as she was pulled along the floor. "Go ahead, Santana. Do it. It's still in your system. I still saved you."
"And who's going to save you?" the Reptile demanded, her tail flicking down by Quinn's head.
"No one. That's the beauty of it."
The Reptile's brow furrowed as it pulled Quinn up by the neck. Human eyes shone out of her scaled face. "You want to die. Of course. What else could you do with all those emotions? You want nothingness, but you can't kill yourself. That'd be a sin."
"I want it to stop hurting," Quinn corrected gently. "Just on my own terms."
The Reptile tossed Quinn to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Quinn felt the impact dimly, like it was happening to someone else. The Cheerio.
The Reptile compulsively scratched at its arm, rending the flaky scales to expose baby-pink skin. "Yes… I remember that. I knew it was risky, experimenting on myself, but the noise… all that confusion, always worrying what people would think. But in here…" the Reptile tapped the side of its head, then scratched at it, opening the skin to let out a growing ear. "It's quiet. You can think. It's like a dream…" It toed Quinn, rolling her over. Letting her see the pit under the machine. "I'm not going to kill you. I'll make you better."
It kicked Quinn and she went over. But she grabbed the edge and held on, even when the sudden strain woke her body up full of pain. She didn't know what difference it made, dying a woman or dying a lizard, but it struck her that Santana was wrong. The noise was chaos, but there was love mixed in there. Even if it took the form of Rachel instead of Finn, she didn't want to leave it behind. So she hung on. And the Reptile stepped on her fingers. Quinn's hand slipped. Quinn hung from one arm while the other dropped to her side.
The Reptile stepped on Quinn's other hand even as her foot shrunk into a human's. "You'll see. Then you'll turn me back, and we'll save Brittany and everyone else. You have to admit, the three of us would make a hell of a team."
"I thought we were a team," Brittany said.
The Reptile turned. Brittany had dragged herself out of the cage and limped her way over to them. At the sight of her bruises, the Reptile hissed.
"We are! We will be!"
"Do you care about me?"
"Of course I do! I'm doing all this for you! To protect you! You don't know how people can be to people like us. So we have to change!"
"You're not changing, you're staying the same. You care more about power than me. You'd rather be a monster than be with me."
"No!"
"Then stop. Just stop. Or I'm leaving and no matter what you do or how you change me, I'll never speak to you again."
Santana stood there, dumbstruck, half her face human and the other half still stretched by a snout. She didn't understand why Brittany didn't want this… and she did. "We don't have to be freaks, Britt. This is the only way we won't be freaks."
"I've never felt like a freak when I was with you."
Santana took her foot off Quinn's hand. She held herself lizard-still as Brittany hugged her, but then her heart pounded and her shoulders heaved with sobs. The Reptile melted away like Brittany was squeezing it out of her, until she was just a small, naked form falling into Brittany's arms.
"Always come back to me," Brittany begged.
"Always," Santana agreed.
Brittany looked over at Quinn's hand. "It can be a group hug."
A finger slipped.
***
When Rachel got home, she found a message on her answering machine. It'd been there for hours, but some reason, that blinking red light filled her with a sense of urgency.
"Rachel, it's me," Quinn said, and Rachel was so glad they'd reached a point where they could just be 'me' with each other. "I don't know when you'll get this message. For all I know, we're listening to this together, sipping margaritas and laughing at how serious I was. I hope so. I just wanted to... I don't know. Everything was so clear in my head a while ago. I don't know who else could find this, so I'll just say that I'm alright now. Everything's going to be okay. I don't know what else to say. But I think I found what it was I was looking for. Goodbye. And thanks. For everything."
For some reason, it made Rachel sad to hear Quinn talk like that.
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,081
Characters/Pairings: Rachel/Quinn, Santana/Brittany
Previous: Part 9
Summary: For Rachel, being in love is all questions, no answers.
Quinn remembered the way to the nerve center of the city's underground transit system from a case she'd worked involving subway pirates. There'd been cops camped out with coffee and donuts then too. Detective Goolsby and Inspector Cochoran were already there, surveying maps.
"Evening, Shelby," Quinn greeted warmly. They'd worked together on the Sunshine Corazon kidnapping. She'd always admired Shelby's MILF status. Not everyone aged so gracefully.
"The Cheerio!" Goolsby shouted. He was tough, hard, and about 5'2.
"Bonus points to my publicist," Quinn retorted.
Goolsby looked around at all the cops snapping pictures on their phones. "Someone arrest this clown!"
"Oh, Goolsby, I just can't take you seriously when I feel like you should start every sentence with 'Oompa loompa doompadee doo.'" Quinn dropped down next to Shelby. "Where's the Reptile?"
Goolsby puffed up. "My SWAT boys are flushing him out as we speak. We're have him within the hour."
"You've been saying that for the last four hours," Shelby commented.
"And it's a she," Quinn added. "I'm going after her. You can help me or not, but I know how to find her and how to stop her."
"The city of New York does not endorse vigilantism," Goolsby said primly.
"Listen, Tyrion, I loved you in Game of Thrones, but this is sci-fi, not fantasy. Butt out."
"Fine, I'll do it myself." Goolsby pulled out his handcuffs. "I am placing you under arrest—"
"Sergeant!" Shelby barked. "Why don't you go give a status update to the Mayor? I'm sure he'd like to know who's joined the search."
***
The subway map was a Gordian knot of red, blue, and orange lines going through the boroughs like veins. Shelby tapped on one of them. "Alright, this is the only electrical connection anywhere near open water. It's like an underwater cave."
"Why didn't they shut the power off?" Quinn asked.
"I don't know. Politics or something. No one ever used the thing, it was a drain of about a half-watt every decade. Why go to the trouble of fixing it? It's called the Astor Tunnels. Over a century ago, Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, and a bunch of other rich bastards built a private railcar line. Came down from Pelham, under the Park, beneath the Knickerbocker Hotel, the Fifth Avenue parkfront mansions. Fancy private stations and waiting rooms. The deepest excavation in the history of New York."
"What, were they looking for oil?"
"Geology. Had to go deeper than the existing train lines and early subway tunnels. But right below is a layer of rotten Precambrian siltstone, so they had to go deeper. Thirty stories deeper. With those deep tunnels, they could go straight out of the city, come up around Croton, and be on their way. No delay, no mixing with the common folk."
"Why were they abandoned? CHUDs?"
"Worse. Maintenance. Beneath most of the sewer and storm like they were, you could never keep them dry. Then there was methane buildup, carbon monoxide, you name it."
Quinn remembered that from her science class. "Heavy gases seeking the lowest level."
Shelby nodded. "They spent millions on those damn tunnels. Never finished the line. They were only open for two years before the flood of ninety-eight overwhelmed the pumps and flooded the place. So they bricked everything up. Didn't even pull out the machinery."
"Then that's where she'll be."
"How can you be sure?" St. James piped up, holding up the bag Quinn had asked for. Inside was everything she needed to navigate the tunnels.
Quinn grabbed the bag from him. "She needs power to run the machine and having it only accessible from the water makes it easy to defend. She's a monster, not stupid. If you didn't have me, how would you get her out of there?"
St. James conceded the point with a shrug.
Shelby pulled Quinn inside, talked to her as Quinn looked through her things. She'd asked for three flashlights and she checked all of them to make sure they worked.
"Can you beat it?" Shelby asked.
"Why would I go down there if I couldn't?"
"Goolsby asked the Mayor for permission to pump the area full of cyanide gas. God help us if any of it leaks out, but that's our only other play."
"It won't come to that."
"Great. I'd hate to waste good cyanide."
***
Rachel didn't know where else to go.
After befriending Quinn, Finn's hospital room seemed colder and starker somehow. Rachel hugged herself after she set down a bouquet of flowers. She'd never brought any before, but today seemed like it needed it.
"Hi!" she greeted Finn, throwing her whole arm into a wave. "It must seem like we forgot you exist. Sorry about that. Things have exuberated… things have gotten pretty exuberated lately…"
The flowers at Finn's bedside were wilted. Quinn's. Rachel picked them up, found one or two that still had life in them, and added them to her own vase. It was purple. Just one more bit of color for the white hospital room. It seemed like the hospital was designed to dry out color. Even Finn's clothes were white now, and he was getting so pale…
"Did you know about Quinn?" Rachel asked. "About her… day job? Yeah, I bet she told you. She must've told you everything. You two must really have been in love, because she is so lost without you."
The chair next to his bed always squeaked when she pulled it over to sit down. Rachel liked to cry, she was good at it, but she sniffled and resisted the tears this time. They seemed cheap now, like she had no right to them. "What's happening, Finn? Just when we're pulling everything together, it seems like everything's tearing us apart. You're a good person, what could you have possibly done to deserve this? There are supervillains and corruption and now monsters and I just can't tell what's going on, what's wrong with the world. I miss you. I miss... I miss not having to care. What was so bad about the way things used to be? Are things going to get better? And how did you survive it, knowing she was out there and she could die? She could die, Finn. Why does she have to be out there? Why's she the only one who can do these things? It's not fair. I know life isn't fair, but something should be. She deserves it."
Rachel stood. She was so worked up all of a sudden. She rubbed her arms, trying to warm them up. Maybe it really was cold in there. "But I guess someone has to do it. I'm glad it's someone like Quinn. Even if I wish it were anyone else. Thanks for listening. If I find her... I'll take care of her. I promise."
***
Quinn was thirty stories down. Water dripped down into the subway tunnel, echoing along with her footsteps across monumental archways that gave way to naves as big as Notre Dame.
She scoured her flashlight over a shantytown: cardboard walls, electrical wiring, elaborate debris kitchens. The walls were infested with messages, everything from "Kilroy was here" to elaborate poetry, written around crude graffiti. The latest depicted various reptiles. No wonder it was abandoned.
Up ahead, the tunnel was bricked over. The wall had been completely covered with graffiti, like the old inhabitants were a primitive tribe paying homage to a god. Quinn supposed you didn't live in a subway if you were the kind of person who got freaked out by one giant lizard.
Summoning up all her strength, she banged her fist against the wall. It held. And attracted attention. A voice shivered through the wall.
"Who is it?" Brittany asked.
"You're not Santana… who's in there?"
"It's me… Brittany S. Pierce."
"The Reptile kidnapped Britney Spears?"
"No… that's a common mistake. My name's spelled B-R-I-T-T-N-Y."
"Oh. Good. I was thinking of leaving you here." Quinn looked up to see a crack in the wall. It wasn't big enough for her, but she wondered if the Reptile could've slithered through it. Shooting a ribbon up like a grappling hook, she climbed up to look through it.
The abandoned subway station was like Grand Central's dead little brother. It was obvious that there was a time that the cavernous space had glistened with immense Gothic statuary, tile mosaics, and decorative arches. Now it was a frozen maelstrom of twisting cast iron trusses, broken steam pipes, fragmented scaffolding and hanging cables. Cracked mannequin faces stared out from a tailor shop with its sign eternally turned to CLOSED. A flower parlor had replaced its roses with cobwebs. A group of abandoned turn-of-the-century subway cars decayed on parallel tracks. Glimmering debris littered the floor--cans, eyeglasses, chrome, foil, glass shards, broken watches... even gold teeth.
"Brittany?" Quinn called. "Where are you?"
That's when Quinn saw the machine. A spidery assembly of parts, it sat above a pit in the floor. Cables sprawled out from it into other equipment, including one braided cord tapping into the city's power. And above it, Brittany was inside a cage.
A rattle filled the air, ominously jangling like war drums. Quinn followed the noise to the far side of the station as the Reptile emerged from the shadows.
Its back had sprouted armor plates like a Stegosaurus's, and a cobra's massive hood surrounded its horned head, while its snout had grown out into a crocodile's maw.
"What are you doing to her?" Quinn demanded.
"Making her the first of many." Horribly, the Reptile's vocal cords had fit into its new body, now letting out its human voice from monstrous teeth. "When I'm done, she'll rule by my side. Cold. Logical. Reptilian."
"I don't want to be a lizard," Brittany protested. "I'd eat flies and I think they have a lot of calories."
The Reptile hissed as it threw a lever all the way from one end of its arc to the other, turning the machine on. A ray of light shot down the pit and into the water, which churned and bubbled. Steam rose up to billow around it.
"Soon…" It looked up at Quinn, its eyes kicking back light like an animal's. "Leave now, cheerleader. Turn away and enjoy what time you have left before I use my machine on the water supply. Humanity is about to become an evolutionary dead-end."
Quinn hit the wall until even her impervious knuckles stung, but all it got her was a dent the size of a dinner plate. Someone grabbed her shoulder. When she turned, Finn was there.
"Please. Don't do this. I don't want you to die."
Quinn massaged the knuckles of her hand. "You're not real," she said, not quite sure if she wished she were lying or not.
"You wouldn't leave me alone, would you?"
Quinn's fingers clenched. "Finn, do me a favor. Don't watch. I'll see you soon."
***
The police didn't ask many questions when Quinn told them she needed their help to rewire the track. In no time at all, with no warning at all, the train was lurching forward. Wheels sparked and kicked into gear; rusting, creaking, the train groaned down the tracks. Quinn was right there with it. One last chance to have a purpose.
She'd known, intellectually, on a level Finn could never appreciate, that she'd lose sometime. You didn't have to be great at math to know statistics. No one could win forever. So, the only thing that mattered was how you looked when the cards came up a dead man's hand. Did you frown, did you close your eyes, did you whimper in fear? Or did you grin and bear it?
Quinn had a smile on her face. A small one, but nonetheless genuine. She wasn't afraid at all. Just tired. She finally understood why all the ancient warriors wanted to die in battle. At the last moment, at the bitter end, there was no more rage for the dying of the light. There was a kind of peace. A kind of hope.
Something Quinn could savor.
The train hit the wall and burst through, derailing, scraping along the floor in morass of kicked-up stone and sheared-away sparks. It was headed right for the Reptile. It hissed and turned, only for its tail to knock the train aside. The train screeched away into the drop-off that let the original flood waters in, falling over the edge with a suddenly ghastly silence. Then came the muted sound of its hit and the slow music of it sinking.
"Nice save," Quinn said.
the Reptile turned, just realizing that Quinn wasn't in the train as the blonde swung into it at full speed. They soared over the chasm and into the opposite wall, hitting and making a crater the size of a pool. Quinn backflipped away and landed on dry land, while the Reptile, dazed, hung from its armor plates embedded in the wall. the Reptile tore itself loose and hit the water. Quinn looked down to see the ripples of her impact disappearing amidst the bubbles leaking up from the sunken train.
"Let's get this over with."
Then the water exploded, the Reptile breaching the surface like it was sprung from a coil. Quinn braced herself, but she still wasn't ready for how fast the Reptile was. The Reptile rammed into Quinn, carrying her into the air where the Reptile took hold of her and flung her down, into a fallen chandelier. The noise of its dusty glass cracking filled Quinn's ears. It was still twinkling when the Reptile stomped up to Quinn and ripped her out of the shattered glass. Quinn dangled from its grip, boots pumping a meter off the ground.
"I can smell your emotions. Love, fear, regret, happiness. Such confusion makes you weak!"
"Wanna know what makes you weak?" Quinn asked, holding a chandelier crystal up to the light. When the Reptile looked up at it, she buried the crystal in its eye. "No depth perception."
It let go of her and that was all the time she needed to juke to the left and pull rebar from a damaged pillar. She swung the bar into the Reptile's gut, screaming, yelling louder and louder with each hit until the length of rebar broke clean in two.
Quinn backed away, trying to think, as the Reptile pulled the crystal out. Her eye slitted shut, then opened, uninjured. Quinn was so dumbfounded that she dodged too late when the Reptile made its move—or maybe it just didn't matter. With a spurt of blood, claws slashed across her chest. Quinn's dodge ended in her hitting the floor, raked over the debris left by the subway train. The Reptile lunged, aiming to press her to the floor and gobble her down, but she caught it on top of her bended legs and then sprung her knees out, sending it flying. The Reptile flew up to hit the chandelier clasp holding up Brittany's cage. It gave way.
Quinn sprang into action, rolling to the side and coming up on one knee, throwing out a ribbon from her baton. It shot through the bars of the falling cage and hit the wall. Quickly, Quinn threw her baton up to embed in the wall, turning the ribbon into a clothesline and leaving the cage hanging.
As the Reptile attacked again, Brittany reached between the bars and grabbed the ribbon, pulling the cage along hand by hand.
A hand pressed painfully to the wound on her chest, Quinn kept one step ahead of the Reptile, leaping and dashing through the abandoned storefronts. Behind her, a runaway bulldozer couldn't have been more destructive. The Reptile pinned her down in the tailor shop, bearing her to the ground amidst scores of mannequin witnesses. Snarling, it put its foot to Quinn's head and pressed.
"Did you know you've got something stuck in your teeth?" Quinn asked, firing her second baton down its throat.
Gagging, the Reptile staggered back. Quinn grabbed it by the tail and swung it around, swiping through shelves, rushing up decayed scraps of cloth before letting go. The Reptile crashed through the storefront window and hit a pillar outside, shattering the base and rolling away. Quinn came out running, leapfrogged it, and kicked the rest of the pillar out.
"Timber," she quipped as it fell toward the Reptile. Who caught it. With a crack of her wrist, Quinn sent the tip of her ribbon across its eyes. It let go of the pillar, which cracked over its head. Quinn went in for more, but stumbled. When she got up, she saw an imprint of her blood on the floor.
The Reptile was watching her, its form whitened by the dust from the pillar. Quinn was soaked in her own blood. They breathed heavily, trying to pull back a little of what the fight had taken out of them. The eye of the hurricane.
Quinn charged. Screaming out all the rage, all the pain, everything in her life, she was on the Reptile, hammering it with lefts and rights so hard that you could hear stones rattling, a rapid-fire volley of hits that she put every last ounce of energy into and there was no way the Reptile could take it, no way in hell it could still be standing...
Quinn fell against it weakly, utterly exhausted, feebly trying to lay into it with a few pitiful blows. The Reptile bore them, tilting Quinn's chin up with one claw.
"You still have time for one last joke. The punchline better be a good one. Only God will hear it."
"Well, I know He has a sense of humor... since you're standing here."
The Reptile put its claw to the hollow of Quinn's throat and pushed, the razor-sharp tip just drawing blood…
Brittany had pulled the cage along Quinn's ribbon all the way to the wall, where the tip was buried. Putting one foot against the brick, she pulled on the ribbon with both hands until it came out. The cage dropped, air whistling through the bars, and hit the ground, breaking open.
The Reptile was distracted. And while it was distracted, Quinn grabbed its claw and buried it in its own belly.
"You don't want to feel anything?" Quinn demanded, bounding back up. "That can be arranged!"
She circled around the Reptile, leaping over the tail and landing in the armor plates, wedging her legs into them. Her fingers still slick with blood, she grabbed the Reptile's upper mandible in one hand and the lower mandible in his other. "Say ahh!" Pulling in opposite directions, she ignored the Reptile's flailing, didn't even notice when its claws drew blood from her thighs or arms. Finally, with a sharp crack, something gave.
Quinn pulled Mike Chang's vial from her boot. "It's your lucky day. The human race has one more opening, if you get your application in quick!" She popped the cork and poured it down the Reptile's throat.
The convulsions the Reptile went into finally threw Quinn off. Veins corded in its neck and desiccated scales peeled off to expose smaller, more flesh-toned ones. The snout shrunk like it was trying to go back into her face. Flecks of white appeared in her eyes...
"That's it, Lopez, fight it!" Quinn urged, winding her cape around her blood-smeared torso.
The armor plates dropped away and shattered on the floor like peanut brittle. Quinn stepped over them to put a hand on Santana's shoulder. It felt warm.
"Fight it…" Quinn begged.
"I am," the Reptile said as it swiped her away. Quinn flew back, into a wrecked piano, and didn't get up. The Reptile came up to drag her out of the nest of piano wires.
Quinn laughed as she was pulled along the floor. "Go ahead, Santana. Do it. It's still in your system. I still saved you."
"And who's going to save you?" the Reptile demanded, her tail flicking down by Quinn's head.
"No one. That's the beauty of it."
The Reptile's brow furrowed as it pulled Quinn up by the neck. Human eyes shone out of her scaled face. "You want to die. Of course. What else could you do with all those emotions? You want nothingness, but you can't kill yourself. That'd be a sin."
"I want it to stop hurting," Quinn corrected gently. "Just on my own terms."
The Reptile tossed Quinn to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Quinn felt the impact dimly, like it was happening to someone else. The Cheerio.
The Reptile compulsively scratched at its arm, rending the flaky scales to expose baby-pink skin. "Yes… I remember that. I knew it was risky, experimenting on myself, but the noise… all that confusion, always worrying what people would think. But in here…" the Reptile tapped the side of its head, then scratched at it, opening the skin to let out a growing ear. "It's quiet. You can think. It's like a dream…" It toed Quinn, rolling her over. Letting her see the pit under the machine. "I'm not going to kill you. I'll make you better."
It kicked Quinn and she went over. But she grabbed the edge and held on, even when the sudden strain woke her body up full of pain. She didn't know what difference it made, dying a woman or dying a lizard, but it struck her that Santana was wrong. The noise was chaos, but there was love mixed in there. Even if it took the form of Rachel instead of Finn, she didn't want to leave it behind. So she hung on. And the Reptile stepped on her fingers. Quinn's hand slipped. Quinn hung from one arm while the other dropped to her side.
The Reptile stepped on Quinn's other hand even as her foot shrunk into a human's. "You'll see. Then you'll turn me back, and we'll save Brittany and everyone else. You have to admit, the three of us would make a hell of a team."
"I thought we were a team," Brittany said.
The Reptile turned. Brittany had dragged herself out of the cage and limped her way over to them. At the sight of her bruises, the Reptile hissed.
"We are! We will be!"
"Do you care about me?"
"Of course I do! I'm doing all this for you! To protect you! You don't know how people can be to people like us. So we have to change!"
"You're not changing, you're staying the same. You care more about power than me. You'd rather be a monster than be with me."
"No!"
"Then stop. Just stop. Or I'm leaving and no matter what you do or how you change me, I'll never speak to you again."
Santana stood there, dumbstruck, half her face human and the other half still stretched by a snout. She didn't understand why Brittany didn't want this… and she did. "We don't have to be freaks, Britt. This is the only way we won't be freaks."
"I've never felt like a freak when I was with you."
Santana took her foot off Quinn's hand. She held herself lizard-still as Brittany hugged her, but then her heart pounded and her shoulders heaved with sobs. The Reptile melted away like Brittany was squeezing it out of her, until she was just a small, naked form falling into Brittany's arms.
"Always come back to me," Brittany begged.
"Always," Santana agreed.
Brittany looked over at Quinn's hand. "It can be a group hug."
A finger slipped.
***
When Rachel got home, she found a message on her answering machine. It'd been there for hours, but some reason, that blinking red light filled her with a sense of urgency.
"Rachel, it's me," Quinn said, and Rachel was so glad they'd reached a point where they could just be 'me' with each other. "I don't know when you'll get this message. For all I know, we're listening to this together, sipping margaritas and laughing at how serious I was. I hope so. I just wanted to... I don't know. Everything was so clear in my head a while ago. I don't know who else could find this, so I'll just say that I'm alright now. Everything's going to be okay. I don't know what else to say. But I think I found what it was I was looking for. Goodbye. And thanks. For everything."
For some reason, it made Rachel sad to hear Quinn talk like that.
