You Have To Let Them Shine
Please do not hesitate to ask questions or leave fanmail in my ask box. While I may not have a large fanbase yet, I expect that as soon as I headline my first show, it will much more difficult to reach me in this personal a manner.
An RP blog
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“I really do like to perform.”
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I’m always gonna wanna make it move.
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“I won’t tell a soul,” she swears, tracing an ‘x’ over her chest. “But someday you might want to play for people. You’re very good. I’m sure you’d still sound great on the piano, too. I just never would have pegged you to be so musically inclined.” She studies the pattern on…
“What?” She’s truly shocked. “I didn’t mean to insult you or your playing. I—I was just kidding. I’m so sorry.”
Perfect. She’s made one, small misstep. She’s assumed a familiarity she hasn’t earned and it has completely turned the tables on the whole afternoon. This is awful. She’s tried to keep things light and uncomplicated, but with one poorly received joke.
Quinn looks panicked, and all the color has drained from her face. “Are you all right?” Rachel asks. “Do you feel okay?” Maybe Quinn’s sick, or maybe she’s in pain. “Do you need me to go get your mom?”
The suggestion seems to rob Quinn of even more of her usual calm, so she instantly tries to take it back.
“Okay, I’ll go. Um, text me later or something? Let me know you’re all right?” She hugs Quinn’s shoulders and makes a beeline for the front door.
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
Rachel hears Quinn’s voice coming from her room and hurries back to the room with two glasses of water. She must have been gone longer than she thought and she hoped it didn’t raise suspicion. She handed Quinn her drink and settled back onto the bed, where her phone lay,…
“I won’t tell a soul,” she swears, tracing an ‘x’ over her chest. “But someday you might want to play for people. You’re very good. I’m sure you’d still sound great on the piano, too. I just never would have pegged you to be so musically inclined.” She studies the pattern on the ceiling and considers Quinn’s request. “Why do you keep it a secret anyway?”
“What’s so funny?” She asks as Quinn doubles over with laughter. “I want to learn to play the guitar! Then I’ll be able to accompany myself on acoustic arrangements of Broadway standards if I ever perform small concerts at intimate venues.” She raises an eyebrow. “Plus, half the boys in glee can play it. It can’t be that hard.”
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
Rachel strides out of Quinn’s bedroom to the expanse of the foyer. It’s so quiet in the house and her ears strain for any hint of floorboards creaking or footsteps falling. She doesn’t hear anything and so she ascends up the stairs. The kitchen is on the first floor, but she has a slight detour to make first.
It’s easy to tell which bedroom belongs to Quinn. There’s a WMHS pennant on the door with a small, shining cross underneath. Rachel takes a sweeping glance down the hallway, just to make sure she’s alone, before she pushes the door open.
She looks around the room for just a minute as she formulates her plan. She’ll have to ask Quinn’s mom to help her arrange the details and she makes a mental note to call when Quinn isn’t home. She pads down the hall and finds her way to the kitchen. She fills two glasses of water, one for herself and one for Quinn, before she heads back. She tries to conceal the grin that she knows is threatening to reveal her plan.
It’s quiet in the room now. There’s only the sounds of a few strums here and there. Maybe some vocalizing, and lyrics sung. Quinn didn’t even have to concentrate on the chords anymore. It was more of a muscle memory now. Her lips mouthed out words and her vocal chords produced sounds, but her mind and her eyes wandered.
Quinn’s fingers stop and a dead silence bathes her. She pauses for a few seconds before taking the guitar by the neck and the bottom, placing it on the bed. Rachel was taking so long, she was becoming restless. Damn chair. She began to wheel it toward the door. She grabbed the handle and looked around the hall, “Rachel?”
Rachel hears Quinn’s voice coming from her room and hurries back to the room with two glasses of water. She must have been gone longer than she thought and she hoped it didn’t raise suspicion. She handed Quinn her drink and settled back onto the bed, where her phone lay, mid-buzz. Another call from Finn, she suspects. She ignores the sound again and looks to Quinn, who is still bent over her guitar.
“Have you always played?” She asks. Quinn seems so skilled and practiced, like she’s been doing this forever (but to be honest, Rachel wouldn’t know the difference). Maybe she just has a lot of time to work on it.
Quinn plays a little riff and Rachel watches her fingers pluck the strings.
“Do you think you could teach me to do that?”
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
“Well all that practice has certainly served you well. You play beautifully. I’m glad you didn’t through it out the window.” That blush again—before today she has never seen Quinn so bashful. It’s endearing and allows her to shed those lingering anxieties about seeing Quinn…
The song draws to a close, but Rachel doesn’t want the moment to end.
“What else can you play?” Quinn rattles off a list of songs Rachel knows and she asks Quinn to play “Ooh Ooh Child.”
Her voice is velvet and smooth as she dips into her lower register. Quinn’s fingerpicking is delicate and precise and it feels so right. Halfway through the song the lyrics are so clear to her and cut so close: “things are gonna get easier. Ooh ooh child, thing’s will get brighter.”
And all of it, Finn, NYADA, graduation, Quinn’s injury, the broken engagement, it all comes to the surface in that moment and the sheer enormity of it all brings a lump to her throat and tears spill down her cheeks as she hits the chorus again. Her voice is tighter, but she turns and see’s Quinn, mouthing the words along.
“Sing with me,” she says, closing her eyes and waiting for Quinn’s voice to join and intertwine with her own.
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
“I’ll pull them up. Do you want me to google the tabs, too?” The song had sounded straight forward enough. If Quinn could play it, she could figure it out. She walks to the other side of the room to retrieve the guitar and places it on Quinn’s lap.
From Quinn’s…
“Well all that practice has certainly served you well. You play beautifully. I’m glad you didn’t through it out the window.” That blush again—before today she has never seen Quinn so bashful. It’s endearing and allows her to shed those lingering anxieties about seeing Quinn as a rival instead of a friend. She’s human.
Rachel nods and Quinn launches into the opening of her song. Rachel starts in on the first verse, but fumbles the lyrics and her voice cracks as she attempts a belt. Now it’s her turn to blush. “I guess you’ve only heard me sing after hours and hours of practice. My first attempts are rarely perfect.”
Maybe she’s trying too hard. She asks Quinn to start again and takes a lighter, more relaxed approach. The notes spill out and she finds herself singing comfortably and losing herself in the song. It’s so intimate, just her and Quinn and the guitar. It feels so casual, but so extraordinary all in one. She never sings like this—so easily and effortlessly without making a big production out of things. Right now is different. Right now she feels like she doesn’t have to.
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
For some reason Quinn is blushing, but Rachel thinks it’s actually quite becoming. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you just now, but it’s…I’m just so impressed by everything I’m learning about you. What do you like to play?” She won’t mention her own aborted attempts to learn the guitar. Her fingers lack the natural dexterity needed to form the chords and her efforts, according to her father, sounded like she was strumming a cat—especially when she sang along. “Can you play this song for me?” She points the cursor over Blown Away again. “I’d love to try to sing it.”
Quinn had no idea why her heart was still racing, but she was taken by surprise by Rachel’s request. She’d never played in front of anyone. Especially Santana. There was hesitation but only after the impulse to say yes to Rachel. It was kind of frightening, actually, but she was going to go along with it. Might as well, anyway.
“Yeah, I think I got the acoustics down.” She eyes the guitar for a second and hopes she doesn’t make a fool of herself, or—what if Rachel finds it endearing? Quinn shifts in her chair and tells Rachel to fetch the instrument to her. Once it’s in her grasp, she tunes it as best she can and begins to play a few chords to get herself situated, then swiftly let her fingers play the beginning of the song. “Do you need the lyrics?”
“I’ll pull them up. Do you want me to google the tabs, too?” The song had sounded straight forward enough. If Quinn could play it, she could figure it out. She walks to the other side of the room to retrieve the guitar and places it on Quinn’s lap.
From Quinn’s fingerpicking, she’s much more skilled than she had previously let on. She’s clearly playing the song and she’s playing it well. Rachel does a quick google search for the lyrics and scans them as she tries to remember the melody of the song. She plays the beginning of the song to get her starting note and then looks to Quinn to signal that she’s ready to begin.
But Quinn doesn’t see her sign. Her head is bent low over the guitar and her eyes are gently shut as she plays. She looks so calm and so peaceful strumming away at her own pace. Rachel can’t bear to tear her out of the moment, so she sits on the bed and watches Quinn’s fingers dance over the strings and up and down the fretboard. It’s beautiful and the first time she’s seen Quinn look truly content in ages.
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
She presses her lips together to keep from spoiling the surprise she’s just started to plan and nods. “I guess it makes the idea of leaving for college that much more appealing.” It breaks her heart to see Quinn so unhappy and she wraps an arm around Quinn’s shoulder while they wait for the application to launch.
She tries to change the subject to get Quinn’s mind off of her pain and to keep herself from revealing her brilliant idea. “Wow, you have a lot of music.” The song count on Quinn’s iTunes window says she has over 12,000 songs. “I didn’t know you were such a music buff.”
Quinn’s smile is very small as she browses through her music. She’s got basically every genre, with the exception of screamo and heavy metal, because well— she only dated Puck for, like, two weeks or something, so it’s not like he had a long time to try and make Quinn’s ears bleed with his taste in music. She’d been into some indie and there was a lot of instrumentals so she could practice her singing whenever she didn’t want to sit at the piano, or pick up her guitar (which only a select few know about—and by select few she means Santana.)
She finally gets to Carrie’s album and she hovers over the songs. Maybe she’ll let Rachel pick. If she’s honest, she was kind of—perhaps afraid is a rash term, but, yeah— afraid that Rachel would totally be turned off by it if it were too much (or too little) of something, so she picks her newest single, Blown Away, which is smack in the middle of pop and country. It sounds like something Rachel could sing anyway, if she really thinks about it.
“Well, there’s still a lot you don’t know about me,” she says and then presses the play button.
There’s a surprising amount of musical theater on Quinn’s computer. Rachel wants to scroll through it and see which cast recordings Quinn has, but maybe they’ll listen to that another time. This is about expanding horizons and trying new things.
Rachel is surprised that the song is so lyrical and poetic. Carrie’s voice is powerful and her range is incredible. Rachel is genuinely impressed. She’s not ignorant enough to truly believe that all country music is produced in backwood shacks by in-bred hicks blowing into jugs, but she didn’t expect the genre to touch her so deeply. When the girl shuts herself in the cellar and leaves her father behind, Rachel doesn’t know whether to smile or cry.
“That was fantastic,” Rachel declares when the song’s final chord fades away. She’d love to try to sing the song—if only she had accompaniment. She spots a guitar in the corner and looks back to Quinn. “Do you play?”
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
At first she doesn’t hear Quinn’s comments about her bedroom because the beauty of the Fabray’s home leaves her speechless. It’s enormous, for one thing, and each room she’s passed through has been meticulously decorated. It reminds her of Gone with the Wind and the image of those old fashioned plantation homes. It’s absolutely gorgeous.
“Oh, that’s fine,” Rachel replied when Quinn’s words finally reach her. But the sadness that colors Quinn’s face says otherwise. It’s not fine.
Quinn leads her into her temporary bedroom and, while also lavishly furnished, it feels a bit sterile. The walls are white, the carpet is beige, and the linens are a generic floral print. Aside from her make up and accessories adorning a low-lying dresser, nothing in this room remotely screams “Quinn Fabray.”
“It’s nice, but you’re right. It isn’t your room.”
The idea hits her in an instant and it takes everything not to blurt it out. It will make a much better surprise.
She places her bag on a hook by the door and she hangs her jacket as well. Rolling over to the nightstand where she has her laptop. “I know. It…” her voice trails away a little. She looks around and, God, she really misses her bedroom. She feels like a guest in her own home and it just alienates her even further. “It’s awful. If I’m completely honest, it’s just unsettling.”
She opens her laptop and clicks on iTunes. As the icon bounces while loading, she sighs deeply. Rachel is still looking about the room in thought and Quinn wonders what she’s thinking. Instead she just continues, “I feel like a stranger here.”
She presses her lips together to keep from spoiling the surprise she’s just started to plan and nods. “I guess it makes the idea of leaving for college that much more appealing.” It breaks her heart to see Quinn so unhappy and she wraps an arm around Quinn’s shoulder while they wait for the application to launch.
She tries to change the subject to get Quinn’s mind off of her pain and to keep herself from revealing her brilliant idea. “Wow, you have a lot of music.” The song count on Quinn’s iTunes window says she has over 12,000 songs. “I didn’t know you were such a music buff.”
(via reallyrdhechdbhfvh)
:)
(via britts-snow)
