The dictionary Quinn owns does not define loathing in a way she finds herself agreeing with. It uses words like ‘dislike’ or ‘disgust’, both phrases that she considers sickeningly inadequate for the sheer intensity of the emotion she feels. Nowhere does it have that strange word that lies somewhere within the crowded gutters of hatred and bleeds into the purposefully derelict sewers of obsession that she means by ‘loathing.’ Nor does her dictionary contain the common side-effects of interacting with those she deems loathsome; the way her pulse begins to rush feverishly whenever they hold each other’s gaze for too long, the heady reeling within her skull upon even the slightest brush of contact, and that furious flush blossoming across her cheeks whenever she was even within the mere vicinity of her.
It’s a feeling that doesn’t bode particularly well for the facade of Quinn Fabray she’s spent so long meticulously curating. Yes, she’s meant to be grudge-holding and hateful, but not to the extent where her feelings could be mistaken for infatuation — trying to quell the fervor of her own loathing is like trying to keep water in cupped hands; it leaks out through the cracks and stains her judgement more than she’d like to admit.
Fortunately, Quinn’s only found herself truly, deeply loathing a singular person.
Unfortunately, that singular person happens to be Rachel Berry.
Like all things involving Rachel, the feeling is grossly excessive. It greatly transcends the general distaste and annoyance everyone holds towards the crazy midget, going beyond Finn Hudson and boyfriends and jealousy; Quinn’s loathed Rachel ever since eighth grade, ever since she first set eyes on her.
Of course, the addition of Finn Hudson had only exacerbated the total detestation Quinn felt for Rachel. Though ceaselessly annoying, Finn had still been her boyfriend, and Quinn obviously hadn’t taken kindly to Rachel’s blatant attempts to steal him from her. Joining Glee Club had been an instinctive decision at the time, one that would later bode quite disastrous to her sanity and that she is still feeling the effects of today.
It marks the first of many forays into the liminal space that stretches between Rachel and her, between what she wants and what she’s supposed to want, between who she is and who she’s meant to be. Before Finn and Glee and everything, Rachel had still been Rachel, but she had been Rachel at a distance — an unwelcome presence clad in deeply questionable plaid or argyle whom Quinn was still nonetheless achingly attuned to, but never close enough to topple into the abysmally magnetic gravity of her orbit.
After joining Glee, Rachel has remained the same girl, but become one who Quinn can no longer pretend didn’t exist when everything gets all too overwhelming and she wants nothing more to bury her head in her hands and sob. Rachel has become extraordinarily real and constant, someone who Quinn now sees daily whether it be within the confines of the choir room or batting doe eyes at her now ex-boyfriend.
To this day, Quinn still can’t understand Rachel’s idiotic fixation with him — while Finn can be sweet, he’s not all that bright, and has always seemed too small a boy to match a girl with dreams as vast as Rachel’s. And while Quinn loathes Rachel to her very core, even she has to grudgingly admit that Rachel’s destined to end up on Broadway someday. As for Finn, though he is admittedly quite alright at times, he doesn’t even seem to be able to see beyond the quaint township of Lima, let alone all the way to New York. He’s an ostensive shackle to Rachel’s stardom, and when Quinn thinks about how Rachel’s going to ultimately have to break up with him because of that, she gets this odd sinking feeling in her chest.
And Quinn knows she ought not to care, ought to intellectually, rationally even be glad that Rachel’s doomed herself to misery, but for whatever reason, her traitorous heart can’t bring itself to. Finn’s her ex-boyfriend, Rachel’s his current girlfriend whom Quinn loathes more than anything, and that’s it. That should be it. If only that were it.
It’s just that these are these moments, few and far between, where Rachel’s better qualities aren’t overshadowed by her immeasurable ego and Quinn forgets to perform the ritual herself and then her gaze finds itself drifting, unbidden, to Rachel. And then she catches herself trying to memorise the precise angles of Rachel’s features, and reverence trickles into judgement, and her thoughts go to a place that’s distinctly wrong and awful and ruinous.
It’s maddening, it’s irrational, and worst of all, it’s entirely involuntary. At first, it had been manageable enough, little glances here and there that she could quickly notice and rectify before anyone noticed, but it’s swiftly spiralled into something wholly incorrigible. And try as Quinn might to justify the action, even she finds her own rhetoric a little thin when Santana inevitably prods in with some deeply offensive yet overwhelmingly accurate assessment of Quinn’s feelings towards Rachel. Those altercations are often brief and far between, because Santana’s a massive hypocrite and the mention of Brittany is enough for her surrender, but still, her words affect Quinn more than she’d like to admit.
They’re among the many things Quinn thinks of late at night, when her eyes burn too much for her to read further, when her mind grows too tired to barricade the door to that dreaded room in the back of Quinn’s mind labeled “Rachel Berry”. The emotions, the thoughts, the memories — they all spill outwards, glaring and loud and impossible to ignore. It’s late at night when Quinn begins to unravel, when the onslaught of questions grows at a pace too quick for her mind to provide an explanation.
She’s helpless to her thoughts as they drift of their own accord to Rachel’s gaze, and that familiar intensity that rushes over Quinn like waves, and how Quinn has to tear her stare away before she is pulled under. It’s the lack of malice that troubles Quinn the most, the way her gaze softens when it meets Quinn’s, as if Quinn hasn’t spent the majority of her high school career attempting to craft the most hellish landscape possible for Rachel. Rachel should hate Quinn, should despise Quinn to her very core, but for whatever perplexing reason, she doesn’t.
One of the most frustrating things Quinn’s come to notice about Rachel is that, barring theft of Quinn’s boyfriend and her generally infuriating demeanour, she’s actually a remarkably good person — far better than Quinn is, and ever will be. She’s irrefutably kind, with seemingly endless reservoirs of sympathy and forgiveness where Quinn is concerned. And when Quinn really examines Rachel from the most objective lens, every criticism she’s leveled at Rachel proves to be baseless and blatantly untrue.
As a matter of fact, when Quinn really looks at Rachel, she can’t really find any proper justification for why she loathes Rachel so strongly. Sure, Rachel took Finn from Quinn, but if she’s being perfectly honest with herself, Quinn knows their breakup had been no one's fault but her own.
The more Quinn analyses Rachel, the more positive traits she finds to grudgingly admit to herself; Rachel’s absurdly talented, objectively pretty if in an unusual way, and so unabashedly herself. Rachel’s been like that since Quinn can remember knowing her — entirely unafraid to express herself in whatever way she sees fit. And though more often than not these actions are stupid and annoying and probably would’ve benefited everyone if they had simply remained thoughts, Rachel’s stubborn devotion to authenticity is something that Quinn can’t help but wish for.
Rachel does whatever feels is right in the moment, and deals with consequences, however disastrous they may be, as they occur. She can speak brazenly and freely about her future and eventual career on Broadway in the same tone that one would claim the sky is blue or the earth is round, because that’s what her future is to her: a casual truth, a simple inevitability. She can lose herself into that wonderful yet achingly fragile world of the hypothetical, free of that harsh anchor of reality, because it’s not hypothetical to her, simply where she’s going to go. Rachel knows she’s going to make it out, knows she’s going to get to Broadway, knows she’s going to become one of the greatest stars the world has ever seen. Rachel’s resolute and unyielding in everyone one of her beliefs, when Quinn can’t even dare to verbalise her own for fear that even verbalising them aloud will cause it all to come crumbling down.
A common misconception among the students of Lima High is that Quinn’s worst fear is confined spaces, and while it is true that she has crippling claustrophobia, the panic of being locked in a closet is nothing compared to the overwhelming dread that comes with the thought of ending up like her mother. Quinn loves her mother, loves her very much, but the idea of turning out like Judy Fabray is one that’s enough to send Quinn into a dastardly spiral for weeks on end.
Quinn doesn’t want her life to reach its peak at age seventeen, and certainly doesn’t want to stay in Lima for the rest of her life. She doesn’t want to marry Finn Hudson and stay with him for the better part of thirty years only to find out that he’s been cheating on her for more than half of them. She doesn’t want a daughter who only calls on birthdays and another whose worst fear is ending up like her. She doesn’t want to have to drink herself into a stupor just to make life bearable. Quinn’s not particularly sure of many things anymore, but these are things that Quinn knows are absolute.
And yet, it’s not the potential future that scares Quinn, more the inevitability of it occurring. Quinn doesn’t want to fail AP English Literature, but she’s not scared of failure in that regard because it’s her best subject and she knows that she can do something about it. Quinn’s fear stems from the fact that, despite what she’s been doing to try and ensure otherwise, she’s always felt this mounting certainty that her mother’s life is the future she’s hurtling towards. On particularly awful days, it feels like a fact, something which she knows to be the concreteness and irrevocability of Rachel with her career on Broadway. It’s terrifying, and try as Quinn might to live in the present, the future always finds a way to catch up with her.
As embarrassing as it is to admit, Quinn sometimes finds herself wishing she could be like Rachel. She doesn’t want to feel the way she does, doesn’t want to feel the weight of the world collapsing around her, doesn’t want to feel her bones straining with the weight of everything she can be but won’t. Quinn wants to think like Rachel, but doesn’t even know where to begin or if she’s even capable of the change necessary to do so. She’ll likely never know, because though it’s all well and good for late night introspection, Quinn would rather die than admit anything to Rachel’s face.
When Quinn finally drifts off into an uneasy sleep, she’s met with a familiar face. There’s a hole in Quinn’s psyche that the idea of Rachel has been gnawing away at for the better part of four years, and Quinn’s sure that if it doesn’t stop anytime soon it will swallow her whole. The dreams are often odd and nonsensical, the feelings she holds in regards to Rachel manifesting in a myriad of strange and abstract ways. Most of the time they’re innocuous enough, but there have been occasional instances where Quinn has woken up aching and wrong.
It’s all terribly confusing, the way Quinn feels towards Rachel. You could name any emotion on the spectrum and she’d be able to list you at least a hundred reasons as to why the term is both accurate and inaccurate. Every interaction with Rachel adds another to the now steadily growing cesspool that Quinn finds herself prisoner to. Because she doesn’t know what else to call it, Quinn calls it loathing.