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After seeing Santana with her bout of Hanahaki and Kurt earlier, Parker Maxwell Booker was pretty damn confident it would never happen with her.
Enter one fucking Marley Rose.
To be honest, Parker knows her tale is a bit of a longer tale, considering that she ended up carrying the disease for two-ish years. A miracle and a suffering. She doesn’t think of herself as strong or anything… no, it just means she was weak, incredibly weak for Marley.
She hates it here. (No, she doesn’t.)
She meets Marley in the middle of Santana’s bout with Hanahaki. She wasn’t too focused on the taking care of Santana side of things, figuring Quinn, Rachel and Kurt had it handled, but was heavily focused on distracting Brittany.
Years down the line, Sebastian would joke that it was the slowburn to end all slowburns… yeah, thanks Sebastian. Way to kill the mood.
The thing was, Parker didn’t know at that time that Marley was going to be special. If she had, she thinks she would have avoided the Hanahaki trap. And for a while, she does avoid the trap, long enough for her to see Santana and Brittany get together and Blaine’s transfer to McKinley. By the time it dawned on her how special Marley was to her, it was too late. She had fallen in love.
(She blames the forget-me-nots Marley had gifted to her. Parker adores those flowers, adores their meaning and pretty blue colour. Marley being Marley, decides to give her a potted bunch of forget-me-nots.)
The first moment she noticed something was wrong came at the worst time. Blaine had returned to school, his eye all better, Sugar had thrown a Valentine’s Day party, Parker got to have a pretty fun time with Marley.
It changed when she went home, and her chest constricted, phantom roots clawing its way into her lungs as she gasped, feeling the pain sear her bones.
Later on, she would ask Santana how her bout with Hanahaki felt like. While they had similar experiences, Santana had more suffocation and oxygen deprivation. Parker just felt like everything was piercing through her lungs and heart on top of the existing constriction.
She didn’t actually throw up petals that time. She chalked it up to a rude coming out to her parents as pansexual when they discovered that she had slept with a girl at some point. And they screamed. They had said they had put up with her for that long, but loving girls? That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
They call social services, to which Parker snatches up the phone and breaks it out of sheer panic. They fly into an absolute rage and tell her she has half an hour to pack and that she will not find a home with them. They call her someone who ruins people’s lives just by existing in it. She’s a monster. She’s wrong.
(She’s not dumb. She knows she has to come out to them at some point. But absent foster parents… conservative foster parents… you get the gist.)
The betrayal is a gut wrenching realization of having no home again , of having to be returned out of a foster home again and realizing that this family, the one she thought was going to be it for the long run, was returning her because she liked and likes a girl currently. She genuinely thought that maybe for once she would finally belong.
She dismissed the pain as heartache from abandonment. After all, whose heart wouldn’t hurt from being left behind by another family who promised to take care of you only to realize, psych! You’re pansexual or like people of the same gender? Haha, you don’t get a home anymore!
You might not be in McKinley anymore. This was probably the last family in Lima that was willing to look after you. Apart from the New Directions.... But they’ll probably leave her too!
… she really has to stop joking about it. Because in that moment it hurt, hurt so bad that all she could do was laugh and cry and pack and panic and run. Her chest aches with betrayal.
Just run.
In a frenzy she calls Finn first, because they were buddies and bros, and in a way she’s like his conscience. His name is one of the first few that appear on her contacts list, and she knows Burt and Carole won’t mind her crashing over their place for a night just so she doesn’t do anything stupid.
Parker will figure out a way to get by eventually, she always does. It was just that the pain was blinding her too much at that moment for her to think clearly.
Burt and Carole are the ones who end up permanently taking her in. They fight with social services, get their home thoroughly checked for stuff that was unsafe, get sat down for rigorous interviews alongside their children, Kurt and Finn (and technically Sam too) while Parker is in hysterics and screaming and in pain that she ends up bouncing from New Direction couch to New Direction couch while the paperwork was being processed and she wasn’t allowed to stay at Burt and Carole’s for a while.
Okay, so, she has abandonment issues. And she has been let down and hurt by so many people that it was why she did what she did much later on.
It doesn’t excuse it though. She should have just manned up and gone for it.
Idiot.
In the wake of that pain, she vaguely recognizes the feeling of Marley holding onto her as she cries. She’s in constant pain half the time, only soothed by Marley.
At that point, she knew she liked Marley, but she figured it was just a crush. A silly crush that had nothing to do with anything. But the pain only went away when she was there.
Parker should have clued in earlier, but she was a dumbass. Of course. With all the chaos after that- well… then there was the Quinn accident and Dave and the Finchel wedding and- it all hurt too much, and when she saw Marley that was when she started hacking up rose petals and that added more to her problems.
Finn was a huge help though. Mostly.
Sometime after Terri decided to give Finn drugs in their sophomore year, they both picked up a drug habit. Parker had been in and out of relapse, Finn had stopped for the sake of Rachel even though he was having problems too lately, with the additional drama.
That meant that when Parker was on the floor coming down from the latest high, Finn knew exactly what she did. What he didn’t expect was the bunch of rose petals littering the floor.
“I don’t need a scolding right now,” she groaned, arm thrown lazily over her eyes and blocking out the sun from partially drawn curtains. “I just finished hacking my lungs up.”
“I don’t need to guess who it is,” Finn said, leaning against the door as Parker moved her arm a little to peek at him before moving it back again. “It must have hit hard for you not to care to hide it from me.”
Parker could not tell if he was referring to the drug usage or Hanahaki and frankly she was too tired to guess.
“Believe me… the universe could not have been any more obvious. Or funny. I think the universe just has a wicked sense of humor.”
“Just like Shakespeare.”
“You diss Shakespeare as if he is the bane of your existence.”
“English is hard because of him!”
Parker laughed at that, which turned into hacking coughs, and then full-on retching as she spat more rose petals onto the floor.
Finn stared at them. Parker stared at them.
“So… Marley, huh?”
“Until you start throwing up entire berry bushes from your lungs you can save me the pity, sympathy or teasing,” Parker snapped, pushing herself slowly off of the floor. “Help me clean this up.”
“You ever consider telling her?” Finn crouched down to clean the petals. Both their hands stained red from the blood, but neither paid any mind.
“No.” She scrubbed at the floor with tissue. “Nobody would love this guy.”
“We love you.”
“Finn… after everything… nobody else would want me for me.” Parker curled up insecurely. “It’s just… not possible.”
“We want you for you.”
“That’s because you guys need me.” The bitterness in her voice was real as she got up and went to the bathroom, Finn following close behind. They dumped the petals in the toilet bowl and flushed it down before turning to wash their hands.
“We don’t need you, we want you,” Finn argued. “You’re a part of the team. You’re living with us. You’re family, bro-“
“I don’t want a family anymore. All the past families I had either treated me like shit, or never loved me, or-or left me!” Parker scrubbed at her hands endlessly, washing away her own blood. “I don’t want people to care about me because they end up hurting me in the end.”
“Like now?” Finn guessed.
“… she’ll never love me. I don’t want to die via her direct rejection. She’ll feel guilty for life when she realizes I have Hanahaki and that she caused me to die. I can’t do that to her. And besides, I hurt a lot of people in the past. I’m a monster.”
“Then you’ll die.”
“She won’t know that it’s her,” Parker said. “You will not tell anybody.”
Finn looked hesitant, then sighed. “It’s your secret. But I still think you should.”
Unwanted.
“No. Even if she somehow loves me now, she’ll end up dumping me somewhere down the line and I can’t live with that.” She started rubbing her hands together under the running water. “Means too much.”
“You’re not confessing because you’re afraid of rejection?”
“She won’t be happy with me, Finn,” Parker ground out. “Who’d be happy with an angry, moody, drug-abusing, smoking, violent, unwanted nobody who has a notorious reputation around the entire fucking state? Who the fuck wants a monster?”
“Mom and Burt are,” Finn spoke up. “They care about you. We do. Marley does. You’re… you’re not a monster.”
She curled in on herself on the floor as Finn huffed and sat next to her.
“Do you believe that?”
“You’re my bro,” Finn said, putting an arm around her. “I’m your bro, and we should stick together. Bros don’t leave each other. And you’re getting better.”
Parker sniffed, wiping her mouth. “You’re still not telling anyone about this, Finn Hudson.”
“I might tell Rachel.”
“I will stuff berry bushes down your throat, don’t you dare test me. She’ll literally know and then somehow everyone will know.”
“They won’t. Trust me.”
-
Rachel, inevitably, finds out. And because Rachel finds out, Kurt finds out. And because Kurt finds out, Blaine finds out. And because Blaine finds out, Brittany finds out. And because Brittany finds out, Santana finds out. And when Santana finds out…
The entire group finds out.
Except for Marley, by Parker’s sheer force of will. And maybe rudely interrupting a conversation between Blaine and Santana that Marley just so happened to be in earshot of and dragging both of them by the ear away from Marley.
It takes everything in Parker not to make good on her promise to stuff berry bushes down Finn’s throat out in ‘I fucking told you so’. It takes even more in Parker to actually stay in the school when the disco inferno rages, stiffly boogieing along with Brittany and Mike that everyone thought she was in the wrong era with the robotic dance moves.
“You okay?” Marley asked, bumping into her as she was about to leave school.
“YEP!” Parker squeaked, feeling the surge of roses in her throat and the familiar itchy, scratchy feeling on the back of her tonsils as she tried to leave. “Never better.”
“It’s just that…” Marley said softly, grabbing her sleeve. “We haven’t hung out in a while. I’m worried.”
She could feel her breath hitch at the contact and she sucked in a breath to try to act normal, buy time and escape. Marley doesn’t deserve this.
Marley doesn’t want you.
“Oh, no… we haven’t.” Parker doesn’t want to hang out. She could practically hear her heartrate speed up. No, no, no. Best distance herself before… “But we can hang out tomorrow and talk about things. Breadstix?”
The smile that lights up Marley’s face is enough for Parker to swallow down the rose petals that were creeping in her throat. She was really running out of air, not too sure how long she could hold her breath for to remain and act normal. What the fuck was she thinking- she should distance herself from Marley so as to not hurt her-
But Marley makes us feel like it’s okay breathing again, her heart argued. We want Marley.
“I was hoping we could hang out today, but I understand if you’re a bit… busy?” Marley made a weird gesture, playing with her fingers. “But tomorrow is fine. I… I really haven’t been able to see you often since.”
“Since I got kicked out, yeah.” She really, really wants to cough. “I… I know you’re worried. Which is why we’ll talk tomorrow. Trust me.” And in spite of the pain that is wracking her lungs, she takes Marley’s hands, stilling them for the moment. “I’m okay.”
That was a big, fat lie.
But at the same time… it wasn’t. Because Marley always makes her feel better, like a balm to the pain. A drug she knows she should shake, but just couldn’t.
Marley scanned her face, observing each and every part of her, before settling into looking into her eyes.
And for a long while, she held her gaze. Because she was telling a partial truth. With Marley, she was okay. And she would fight anything that put that tiny bit of self deprecation in her voice when she mentioned not being able to see Parker often away from her.
“Did I do something wrong?” Marley asked.
“No, no…” You’re not doing anything wrong. I’m wrong. I’m… ughh… this isn’t right. None of this is. Either way I lose. Logically, emotionally, I lose. We both lose. “I just needed some space to process everything. Losing a home and all that hits hard, heh.”
Before Parker could react even more, Marley had thrown herself at Parker in a hug, pressing herself against her.
“You always have a home with me. With us.” The hug tightened. “I care about you. You’re my best friend.”
Best friend. Parker didn’t move in the embrace, too caught in pain and relief washing over her in waves, one at a time, trying to see which one would prevail.
“Okay.”
Pain prevails, and it’s years’ worth of experience that Parker manages to send Marley on her way, drive home and lock herself in the bathroom hiding the pain that was stabbing through her heart. She vomits, she weeps, she cries.
She turns up for the lunch date the next day with a cocky smile and teaches Marley how to shoot a bow and arrow. Parker also hides the rose petals in the foam of her drinks and whenever Marley disappears to the toilet. The customers and waitresses give her pitying looks, but she shakes her head.
Her reputation was big and scary. She didn’t need to be pitied like some child too.
(The rest of them pitied her.)
A pitied monster.
-
Parker reads somewhere that people with Hanahaki, if they live long enough and it hasn’t progressed to the next stage yet, have trembling hands from the pain wracking their bodies.
Santana didn’t have that. Kurt didn’t have that.
She’s a MMA fighter. She’s a student with a 4.0 GPA out of her own merit and intelligence. She’s an archer.
She does not get shaky hands.
(But she still checks, whenever she draws the string, aims the bow. She checks if the arrow shifts in the arrow rest due to minute tremors in her arms or if the bowstring was lightly vibrating because of this fucking disease.)
Not even when dancing and singing and practicing in anticipation for Nationals, struck with anxiety and grief and Hanahaki, waiting, hoping, praying for a victory she had been waiting for ever since she joined three years ago.
They get it. And Marley’s scent fills her nose as she gives Parker an excited embrace and- and-
She’s happy.
But the pain is still there, taunting.
Parker’s just really good at hiding her pain.
She’s done it for years… what’s another one going to do? Kill her?
(Yes. This one was really going to be the death of her.)
She should just die to save everyone the trouble.
-
In the next year, Parker swears that the rest of the members remain in absolute secrecy about her Hanahaki. Marley and Finn got really close after Nationals, and it was out of sheer dumb luck that Parker’s biggest secret was not out to Marley yet.
Finn also makes Parker swear to protect the New Directions, which she does. And she does mean it. She’d defend them till her last breath, but Finn looks at her meaningfully, and then it dawns on her that she is also part of the New Directions, and that she should protect herself too.
This does mean that Parker is in full mama hen mode, something that alarms the current members and the members who just joined (Unique and Marley). She coughs out flowers when she catches Marley talking to Jake.
Jake was a good kid. He was there for the New Directions from the beginning and was there to balance out Puck whenever. Parker and Jake were good bros, but at the moment Parker wanted nothing more than to laser vision Jake.
Artie happens to notice.
“Are… you okay?” Artie mumbled over to Parker, who was glaring at the pair over a book. Or longingly staring. Or pining staring. “You look like you want Jake’s head to explode. Or that expression Santana wore when she saw I was dating Brittany. Do all people who have Hanahaki have the same expression?”
You’re letting this affect you. You haven’t changed at all.
“I’m three seconds from pushing you off of your wheelchair.” She pauses to cough into a tissue discreetly hidden in her sleeves. “Or jamming an arrow in it.”
“You wouldn’t,” Artie joked, and Parker scowled, knowing she had been caught.
Monster. She’ll never want you if you inflict harm.
“I wouldn’t.” She still glares at Jake though.
“You should chill. Jake’s done nothing wrong. We can just tell him you have Hanahaki and he’ll back off.” The look that Parker directed at Artie looked like it came out of a horror movie. “... or not.”
“I don’t need more people pitying me.” She turned her attention back to the pair and her expression turned wistful. “If she’s happy with him, then it’s alright with me.”
Marley turned to her then, raising a hand to wave at her and she smiled brightly. She quickly sat up straight, all traces of jealousy or sadness or pain gone in an instant, to wave back slightly.
All she could focus on was that smile directed at her.
Then it was lost as Jake said something and Marley turned back to him.
Artie watched Parker deflate instantly, coughing violently into her biology textbook before she could bring up her hand to her mouth. The blood and bile splattered onto the pages, which was covered in Parker’s handwriting about archery competitions, deals, science notes and song lists. The red marred the dark blue ink, making it look purple in the light as half of a whole rose rested inbetween the pages.
He had never heard or seen of anyone puking up half of flowers.
Parker, though, stared blankly at the half of a rose and the blood spilling onto the table, staining it crimson, then staring at the palm of her hand as if expecting something to happen.
Artie swallowed hard.
“Are you sure… you don’t want surgery?”
Death was a real thing on the table, Parker realized. But when she thought about not loving Marley for the rest of her life, something twinged uncomfortably in her.
“For better or for worse…” Parker closed the messed up textbook and wiped at the table with a handkerchief in her bag, using her bag to block what she was doing on the table from anybody. “I don’t think I’ll be able to love anyone else.”
She stops hanging out with Marley outside of the New Directions after that.
(She pretends it doesn’t hurt as much when Marley looks hurt when she asks to hang out and Parker declines.)
-
Parker hates Kitty.
No, it wasn’t about Marley. (Okay it definitely was about Marley.)
Finn, Mike, Mercedes and Artie enlist her help to… diffuse tensions. Which was weird because the last person you wanted to mediate between two boys crushing on the same girl and a Cheerio who looks like she could murder said girl was another person who could easily kill all three but was hopelessly in love with the girl.
Okay. That was a lot to take in.
After the disastrous breakups that were Wemma, Brittana, Finchel and Klaine, Parker could find the Ohio halves of the last three relationships moping around the school.
For all of Santana’s Hanahaki… they still broke up?
No, Parker was convinced they were going to get back together in the end. Hanahaki didn’t just choose anybody. It chose your soulmate.
Well, no.
You subconsciously chose your soulmate. Hanahaki just… let you know you did and that you were never getting them.
Santana was getting back together with Brittany at some point.
But how did this tie in with hating Kitty?
Well, Parker wanted to spend time with Marley, and spend her last days with Marley happy. And Kitty was not making either of them happy.
She had something planned, Parker knew it.
Whatever, Parker thought. A little warning here… a little warning there… Kitty would back away from Marley soon enough and whatever plan Kitty has will be busted.
At least… she hopes so.
(She reads that Hanahaki also gives tunnel vision. She wonders that literally or metaphorically until she looks down the arrow and sees only the target.)
(After that, she doesn’t join the girls’ Grease sleepover and shoots arrows until her fingertips bled from digging the arrows out of the hard wood and rough bark of a tree.)
-
Marley kisses her on the cheek for Grease.
Her world comes to a grinding halt as Marley beams at her, before joining Ryder onstage.
Parker’s nights after that are burning, endless pain, tossing and turning, muffled sobbing and screaming into her pillow for a death that was yet to come.
Too selfish and too selfless.
Too stupid.
Too insecure.
That’s what she was.
Too scared to tell someone she loved them out of fear of being unwanted.
But really, after years of actually being unwanted, was her fear justified?
She has a track record of hurting people. Hurting Marley is the last thing she wants.
But she’s hurting Marley anyways.
She continues throwing up half-roses as Finn stops her from relapsing. At least he’s here. He’s her bro, he’s always been her supporter.
-
There is something wrong with Marley’s smile.
It’s the week before sectionals and Parker is all but delirious from pain and exhaustion. And yet she could see something was wrong. Something was fucking wrong.
It’s outside of her pained expression when she looks at Parker nowadays, hands coming up to reach for Parker but just hesitating. It’s more than that. That’s a familiar sight, a familiar stabbing in the heart.
Something was wrong and she’s just realizing it, running on fumes and caffeine and micronaps caught in the day. She hates herself.
How could she be so naive? Marley had had a history of abuse and bullying. Something, anything can tip her over the edge. She was bullied because of her mom, because she was too kind, too good, too-
She lurches abruptly, trying to stagger to Marley, but she’s wracked with pain before she can get close.
Who did this? Her mind was screaming at her. Who?!
“Marley,” she whispers, and then she blacks out.
You didn’t notice. You didn’t care enough to notice.
-
Gangnam Style was the absolute worst song suggestion made.
She’ll probably hate it because she learns to associate the song with the sickening thud Marley makes when she hits the floor, and she’s way more alert now, having passed out for about 24 hours out of sheer exhaustion beforehand and pushing on despite Finn’s concerns.
Her pain is keeping her awake. It will help her now.
The burning pain is nothing compared to the anger when she heard that they lost Sectionals due to some stupid rule, everyone’s anger at Marley as if she chose to faint onstage, and Santana screaming at Quinn when the other members shuffled off back to the stage that Kitty was making Marley anorexic, she absolutely lost it.
The paramedics took Marley to the hospital, and she was light, too light and the paramedics mentioning that she was skin and bones made the tunnel vision set in again.
When Santana corners Kitty alongside the alumni as the current members went home, she all but shoves Santana aside, blazing pain and anger and hurt. She is the devil of McKinley High, and her scary reputation might have been tarnished ever since she joined the New Directions, but that still meant that she was still capable of being deadly.
In barely restrained anger, she wraps her hand around Kitty’s neck and squeezes, lifting her into the air.
“You… you hurt my love.”
Before Finn could stop her she drops Kitty onto the floor and backhands her hard, pain flaring gleefully within her as the heavy bass thump of Gangnam Style echoed in her head alongside Marley’s thud as she hits the ground. She will never unsee that.
She spits an entire rose onto the floor, violently coughing out more blood and roses as Kitty looked between her and the flowers, terrified. Genuinely terrified.
Monster.
She grabbed Kitty by the front of her dress and lifted her up, before slamming her into the ground again.
“Why.”
Kitty couldn’t answer, she squeaked in pain.
“WHY!”
Her hands tightened around Kitty’s neck, squeezing, squeezing, veins popping out as she choked.
Monster.
“STOP!” Finn.
The anger reared its head, white hot and ugly as she released Kitty’s neck, punching her repeatedly in the face.
“That’s enough!” Finn roared, pulling Parker back, as the pain reached a new unbearable height.
Marley would never love you. Not when you’re like this.
Her tunnel vision zeroed in on Kitty’s face, as she drew an arrow. Down the arrow’s body she could see Kitty’s face. Parker couldn’t remember grabbing her bow, or her arrow, but all she could see was Kitty’s face, the arrow, and red, red red of the blood and roses.
Do it. Prove it right.
And rationally Parker had to think. She needed to think. But with the pain and exhaustion creeping in, it was hard not to let her base desires win.
“Marley wouldn’t want this,” Finn said slowly, stepping between both Kitty and Parker. “I know you’re angry. But you need to calm down.”
Calm down. She can calm down.
Her tunnel vision widens, from just where the arrow would fly to, to her entire range of sight.
“Hanahaki makes you irrational and angry at everything,” Santana said slowly, and she seemed to have dug deeper into Hanahaki after her bout with the disease. “The longer you have it and the less time you spend around the person of your affection, you become madder. It’s the body’s way of coping. Pile that up with your already existing abandonment issues and trust issues, you’re a walking time bomb.”
Prove them all right.
“Put down the bow.”
She does. She sets it down, and then she vomits more roses onto the floor.
Coward.
You’re still a monster.
Parker hates this. She hates herself.
She does become calmer after spending day in, day out at the hospital with Marley. Kitty keeps a wide berth from her and only talks to Marley when Parker’s not there.
Kitty knows the truth, and Parker’s… Parker’s just really tired.
-
Marley dates Jake.
Parker resigns herself to her fate when everyone finds out Parker attacked Kitty. The why left unknown, seared out of existence by Parker’s unhinged threats that had a glimmer of potential to come true. Her irrational thoughts bubble but she spends enough time with Marley and Jake to convince herself that the best thing to do is not to do good on Finn’s promise, since all it does is bring others pain.
She apologizes to Kitty, tries to make things right, but Kitty’s so terrified of her now that Parker may have realized that she has lost her final family just by losing control.
You are a monster.
She brings back Glee club and falls into a deep slump, feeling like sinking to the bottom of the ocean like a stone. Red, roses, blood. Rinse and repeat, day in and day out.
It’s a neverending nightmare. All she can do is be frozen in time, suspended in animation. Details are irrelevant. She’s just waiting, waiting, for a death that will never come.
But still she looks at Marley.
As long as Marley is happy, she’s happy.
-
The next few months are a blur.
She’s wracked in pain. There were gunshots, a scream, pain. Blood. Startlingly not her own.
She vomits whole roses day in and day out.
Parker’s hands are trembling now when she aims the arrow at the gunman’s face. Idiot had the audacity to shoot up a school and now… now she can’t even protect anybody.
She misses.
She stops archery upon discovery of the tremors, only feeling Marley’s hand in hers, comforting her after she heard fireworks.
In the bathroom she vomits more roses.
Marley’s so concerned, but her face swims in and out, day by day, doing the same routine.
The roses intensify in numbers.
The end is coming. When will it end?
Finn looks at her.
“You should tell her.”
“Like what, like you’ll tell Rachel you love her?”
“I did.” He smiled. “I love her. I gotta live with what I did, keeping her down here- it’s not fun. She deserves her own freedom. But she deserved to know that I love her too. And that even though I’m going to teach the future kids and she’ll be on Broadway, we both know that we love each other.” He tilts his head. “Marley may be dating Jake but you loved her way before he dated her.”
“Yes but…”
“She deserves to know that. And whatever you did with Kitty… it’s already done. You have to live with it. Now you gotta move forward with it.” Finn fiddled with a ring that Parker recognized as his proposal ring to Rachel. “Like we gotta move forward with our pasts with addiction. Make peace with it.”
“When did you get so wise?”
“I’m your brother, I’m always wise.”
Parker laughed sardonically at that, before she grows quiet.
“How do you do it?”
“Hm?”
“How do you fight on?”
“I fight because I want to make a difference,” Finn says. “It’s like what Rachel fights for. The right to shine. Except I want to shine not like her. But differently. Does that make sense?”
“No.”
“Ah, forget it. It makes no sense when I explain it anyways.” Finn rubbed the back of his head. “But I think if I shine like that, other people will carry on that shine so that when I’m gone… I’m not really gone, gone right?”
-
Her memories and sense of time come back with sudden clarity upon Finn’s death.
It was like swimming through molasses, hard to move and see. All she could see were flashes of memories and pain. Her brain had probably locked most of the memories away, because they were associated with mind numbing, searing pain.
It was like a friend at this point, a constant in her life that Marley would never love her.
Something that would never go away until either of them died.
But when she wakes up the morning of Finn’s death, the pain feels muted somehow. A raging tempest of whirlwind emotions stirs within her and she breathes properly for once. It’s like sitting up after being submerged in a shallow pool of water.
Finn was her brother.
She lost someone else again.
It was like breaking free of Jell-O. Sticky, and wanting to suck you into the muted and numb depths of Hanahaki. A breath of air in a sudden stillness that was her life- halted by Finn’s death, allowing her to catch up. For once, everything returned to her with shocking vigor. Music was vibrant, colours stood out, the sun shone brighter. She could see the full picture again, not tunnel visioned and muddied sight obscuring the tiny details.
It was a sudden shock to the system, an unconscious switch flipping that nobody was there to support her now. No Finn to keep her in check.
She traces the carvings on Finn’s gravestone and looks up at the sky.
Parker resolved to be better. For Marley, for Finn, for herself, no matter what little time she had left.
“You should tell her.”
She can’t. It’s just like a Santana and Brittany case. She absolutely can’t.
“She deserves to know that.”
This time, she notices Marley pulling away from her.
-
Jake cheats on Marley.
They’ve been arguing for a while now, Parker noticed, ever since Finn’s death. Marley was more morose, Jake more tense. She herself had to break up some of their fights because it would have ended in an impulsive breakup.
Marley looks way more paler lately too. She’s concerned, so she asks Marley if her eating disorder was flaring up again. Marley nods, ashamed, and it’s all that she needs to pull her into a warm embrace.
“I’m here for you, even if everyone else thinks I’m a monster.”
“I know.” A pause. “You’re not a monster. At least not to me.”
She isn’t better, not by a long shot, but she can think clearer now, better than the muddled thoughts before Regionals and after Sectionals. She’s working hard to apologize to Kitty, even though she knows nothing she does will ever be enough to make up for her monstrous behaviour.
She’ll never unsee herself as a monster, no. It might be something she might live with for the rest of her life. But losing Finn taught her that it could be something she had to make peace with her sins to her grave, because it was already done.
Parker feels the pain ebb away little by little.
And when Marley storms away from Jake after a hushed conversation, she doesn’t beat the crap out of Jake, she follows Marley instead.
She gives her a hug, nevermind the pain in her chest and the roses in her mouth.
But Marley-
Marley starts choking. Crimson red spills out of her mouth, spraying across her jacket and she looks up at Parker with eyes wide and terrified, face pale.
“I’m… sorry.”
Marley collapses in her arms.
-
The pain only goes away when there’s surgery. Or if they return your affection.
Or if they die.
And the pain, that was Parker’s constant companion in the last year or so, was vanishing.
Her hands shake. She starts screaming.
A final spurt of blood explodes out of Marley’s mouth, followed by familiar blue flowers.
Forget-me-nots. Entire forget-me-nots.
Marley had Hanahaki.
Marley had Hanahaki for a while.
And she was expecting to die for her person.
And it wasn’t Jake.
Marley loves her. Marley loves her. Marley loves her. Marley loves her.
And Marley has been dying since Finn’s death. Maybe even longer than that.
Her body was weak, still recovering from an eating disorder. So weak, but so strong. Marley couldn’t hold out.
She needs to say it. Say it and save Marley.
I love you.
The pain is gone. Quietly. Suddenly. Leaving within an empty void, vast and yawning and she can’t hear her own screaming over the ringing in her ears.
It’s staggeringly disorienting. She can’t think straight. The void was draining more oxygen than the flowers ever did in her chest.
She pounds at her own chest, trying to feel the same ache, the same pain. Anything.
The pain would mean Marley’s alive.
The pain would mean Marley was still here with her.
The pain would mean-
The Hanahaki was gone, but Parker’s hands were shaking, shaking, shaking.
“No.”
Archer’s hands, steady as a stone, now wavering. This wasn’t fair. Parker was supposed to die first.
Marley’s eyes are closed. She can’t feel a pulse. She can’t feel her breathing.
She refuses to believe it.
Parker starts CPR, sweating and panting. Marley’s face blurring with her tears as the students around them gathered. Some had their phones out recording, others were calling the police and the ambulance.
It was a bit too late for that.
She screams and roars.
“I love you!”
There’s no use.
“I always have!”
There’s nobody who could love a monster like you.
“Please…”
And the people who did always die.
“Don’t leave me.”
You always ruin their lives.
“… please…”
You’re a monster.
“Don’t… don’t leave me.”
You’re destined to be alone.
“I love you.”
You will never be wanted.
You will never have a family.
You will never be loved.
“I’d rather be in pain and not have you than lose you and have no pain.”
Monster
Monster
Monster
“I’m sorry I didn’t say it before… I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, but I’m saying it now. I’m saying it now that I love you so please… at least say that you love me back.”
-
Her hand twitched.
She sucked in a breath.
Her lungs were finally clear.
And for the first time in history, love could bring someone back to life.
Parker doesn’t care about history. She has the girl that she loves in her arms safe and sound and everything was finally okay. Okay.
“I love you too.”
-
Hanahaki presented itself in odd ways. Odd symptoms, odd deaths, odd effects.
If the love was truly strong enough, it could bring somebody back to life. Somebody who recently passed from Hanahaki, that was. They were probably the first recorded pair in history to do that.
Marley revealed that she had been suffering from Hanahaki since the school shooting, and nobody knew she had it. Because she didn’t spend enough time with Parker, she irrationally stayed with Jake even though she was in love with Parker.
The Hanahaki kicked up a notch when Finn had died, and that was when it got harder and harder to hide from Jake.
Eventually, Jake found out and stormed out, cheating on Marley. Marley freaked out, believing that nobody would love her anymore. Jake had said that she wasn’t in the relationship anymore, because she was in love with somebody else, and Marley cracked and broke, admitting everything to him and apologized for not telling him sooner. She was so scared of how he’d react.
In his anger, he still persisted in saying that he had a right to cheat, and that made Marley upset, because if he knew then why wouldn’t he have just broken it off before hooking up with another girl?
Marley had also admitted to relapsing since the shooting and getting worse during Finn’s death.
Parker’s hands stopped shaking after the ordeal was over, feeling Marley slip her hand into hers’.
“I’ve always loved you. I just… I knew I couldn’t spring it on you. You were so lost and tired and depressed that I couldn’t.” Marley closed her eyes. “Jake was a getaway option. But I… I still have to apologize to him. For leading him on. For making him think I was in love with him.”
Parker squeezed one, two, three times.
“We all do stupid things,” she said. “We’ll just have to make up for it and live with it. Finn taught me that.”
Marley laughed sadly, swinging their joined hands gently. “I miss Finn. I saw him, you know? For a moment there.”
“What did he say?”
Go back. She still loves you.
“Just… to take care of each other.”
“Hey!” Jake called, alerting them both. He’s grinning like a madman. “Rachel’s looking for you both! We’re having a New Direction dance for the first dance!”
“Of course she is, it’s her wedding!” Parker shouted back, before turning to Marley. “M’lady?”
“Shall we dance?” Marley smiles so gracefully that Parker’s heart turns somersaults in her chest, pain free for several years.
“Yes we shall.”
She thinks of the ring Finn gave to her. The one that was meant for Rachel, his hopes and dreams and everything, entrusted to her. It burns a hole in her back pocket, itching to be held out and presented to her love. Finn would have been happy to see his bro use it, since Kurt couldn’t now, and Rachel was… well… That was a story for another day.
But not now.
“Are you going to ask her?” Jake whispered to Parker as she let Marley go in first.
Jake had, surprisingly, harbored no ill will towards either of them once the drama had died down. He had begrudgingly admitted he had seen Parker trying to laser vision him from afar in the early days of talking. It just… took a while for him to come around.
And when he did…
“I think I knew that I paled in comparison to you. And when I saw the flowers, I just… took it as confirmation. She never stopped talking about you. It didn’t stop me from trying though, but… I was in denial. I can’t get angry though. The way she looked at you from the start was far different from how she looked at me. I should have known.”
“Not yet.”
Jake nodded and patted her shoulder. Then… “Finn would have been proud of you.”
“Yeah, he would have.”
“Come on, go dance with your girl!” Jake yelled, pushing Parker towards the dance floor, where Marley was laughing with Tina and Mercedes, before beaming at the sight of Parker awkwardly weaving her way through the dance floor.
“I feel like a monster for ruining Rachel’s dress by stepping on it. It was just so… long I couldn’t avoid it-”
“You’re a cuddle monster,” Marley insisted but threw her arms around Parker’s neck to pull her closer. “But you’re my cuddle monster and I love you.”
“And you’re like, undead. But you’re my undead and I love you too.”
Marley laughed, pulling her close to press a kiss on her cheek.
“Dork.”
“Your dork.”
One day . Parker thought. One day.
-
Finn smiled at his family, but it was sort of sad.
Because some of them were not there anymore, not as lucky as Parker and Marley to come back to life.
But he’s still proud.
Because he lives on in them, in Rachel, in Parker, in Marley. In the ring that was in Parker’s back pocket.
One day.
Tell me, Parker. My life. Did it shine?