Quartie One-Shots andTeasers
Chapter 3: Tina Gets A Dose of Uncomfortable Truth:
Author’s Notes: The following takes place during a future chapter of Quartie Ever After when Quinn is pregnant with Artie’s baby and the former glee club members throw her a baby shower. Quinn and Artie live in LA, but are visiting Lima. This will make more sense to you if you read that and Quartie Headcannon first.
Disclaimer: This story takes place 18 years after Beth’s birth and neither Quinn nor Artie have had much success in the relationship department. Their frustration and bitterness over that definitely influence them in this scene, so keep that in mind.
The story accepts everything that happened in Glee cannon, even the parts I hated.
My fellow Wildebrams shippers should brace themselves for an uncomfortable revelation.
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Quinn’s family members, along with the former members of the Glee Club and other friends sat around the room chatting. From her spot next to her husband Mike, who was chatting away with Sam, Tina kept glancing at Quinn, who was catching up with Lauren Zizes. Something was cleanly on her mind. Finally she rose to her feet and strode across the room and stopped in front of the guest of honor.
“Quinn, can I talk to you for a minute?” Tina asked. Quinn nodded. “Alone?” Tina added. A look of surprise appeared on her face, but she nonetheless excused herself, and followed the other younger girl into the next room.
“What are you doing with Artie?” She asked.
“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Quinn told the younger girl, with a confused expression. “We are having a baby together.”
She placed her hand on her only slightly protruding baby bump.
“Oh please,” Tina responded. “There’s more to it than that! I know you’ve got ulterior motives. What’s your angle?”
“I don’t have an agile,” Quinn said firmly.
“You forget who you’re talking to, Quinn. I know you! You always have an angle,” Tina lashed out. “I watched you go from guy to guy in high school and college, looking for someone who would bring you the status you wanted, and provide the unconditional love that you never got from your father. But, when you realized that they didn’t love you like that, or you got bored with them, you spit them out and moved on.
“I’m not going to sit idly by and watch you do that to Artie! You’re just using him to get what you want. My question is, what exactly is that? Is this just about having a baby? You could have done that with any of the guys you’ve dated and spit out over the years. I won’t let you hurt him! He’s my best friend, and I know him better than anyone else. He’s a great guy, but a terrible boyfriend, and I know he would never satisfy you long term.”
“And you’re basing this on what?” Quinn retorted, angrily. “Your own failed relationship with him? You dumped him… TWICE!” She almost added cheating on him both times, but Tina would have thrown her relationships with Finn and Sam back at her, so she didn’t; “And for your information, Artie has been one of my most supportive friends through all of that, good times and bad!
“I’m not the same girl I was in high school!” Quinn Continued. “That was a long time ago. I would never treat Artie that way!”
“Until you get bored of him, or he doesn’t give you enough attention,” Tina responded. “It will happen, Quinn. Trust me, I know you! And I know him! He ignored me for months … for a freaking video game.”
“Okay Tina,” Quinn responded, angrily. “That’s enough! I’m so tired of hearing that excuse for your breakup. You’ve been perpetuating that lie, and the one about him dumping you over your fake stutter, for years! It’s time for a reality check.
“After Beth was born and adopted, Puck dropped any illusions of loving and wanting to be with me. Finn was with Rachel and still deeply upset with me; and Santana was busy getting her boob job, and along with most of my other friends completely ostracized me. The rest of you were all too preoccupied with your own lives to think much about me.
“I fell into a deep postpartum depression where I didn’t want to leave my house or even get out of bed. Mercedes wanted to help but didn’t know what to do. Artie camped out at my house, and held my hand, hugged me, let me cry on his shoulder, and listened to me talk about how much I missed her and how guilty I felt giving her up; and how I had treated everyone else, especially Finn.
“He hardly ever left my side. I slept a lot, and when I did, he played the X-Box he brought with him instead of leaving so that he would be there when I woke up. When I finally did get out of bed he still stuck with me every step of my recovery. He did this for almost the entire summer.
“It was only through his help that I was able to start living my life again. I will forever be grateful for his love and support. Because of him, I managed to snap out of my funk, lose the baby weight, and return to some semblance of normalcy by fall; something I doubt I would have been able to do otherwise.”
Tina gave her a confused look
“Oh, and he didn’t distance himself from you because he was playing video games,” Quinn added. “He may have let you believe that, but he did it because you were smothering him from Asian Camp 100 miles away!”
“-No I wasn’t,” Tina interrupted.
“Yes you were! I was there!” Quinn exclaimed. “He told me so, and showed me most of your texts and his call log. My God, Tina, one day you messaged him over fifty times! Eventually he got tired of reading your mundane and passive aggressive texts, and silenced his phone.”
Tina just stood there stunned. “I… I don’t understand,” Tina said, “if that’s what was going on, why didn’t he just tell me?”
“Because if I had,” Artie, who had heard the commotion, and rolled into the room, responded for her, “you wouldn’t have been able to resist telling Kurt and/or Mercedes, and before long the entire Glee Club would have found out, and shortly thereafter the rest of the school. Just like with her pregnancy.”
Their shouting had drawn the attention of the rest of the people in the other room, several of whom had come to investigate. Off to the side of the room, Kurt and Mercedes each bowed their heads in shame because they knew he was right. They really did love to gossip back then. Blaine put his hand on Kurt’s shoulder in comfort.
“You talked about her pregnancy too!” Tina retorted, desperately.
“AFTER it was already out,” he told her. “I knew about it for weeks before the rest of you, and kept my mouth shut. Quinn’s image was extremely important to her, and I knew that if word of what she was going through leaked out, she might never have bounced back.”
“Why would she tell you before the rest of us?” Tina wanted to know, still not believing what she was hearing.
“Artie and I have been friends since we were five years old, Tina,” Quinn told her. “We kind of drifted apart after I moved to Fairbrook, but when I needed someone to confide in, who I knew I could trust not to use it against me, he was first on my list.”
Quinn walked over and sat down on his lap, making Tina noticeably uncomfortable.
“You don’t know a thing about Quinn’s and my relationship,” Artie said, “and I know I can speak for both of us when I ask you to kindly butt out! You’ve meddled in every major relationship I’ve had since you, and I won’t tolerate it anymore. If you can’t be supportive of us, then we don’t want you here.”
Tina stiffened her expression, did an about face, and marched out of the room. Mike gave them an apologetic look and followed his wife out.
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Later that evening, Artie and Quinn were in bed talking.
“What did you mean when you said that Tina meddled in every major relationship you’ve had?” Quinn asked.
“Mostly I was talking about Kitty,” Artie told her, sighing. “Although I’ve always suspected that she had a hand in some of my other breakups, which often happened shortly after the girls met Tina.
“Tina never liked Kitty. She hadn’t liked Marley or Unique either, because she got it into her head that, when Rachel graduated, she would be the female star of the New Directions. She saw all of them as competition that jeopardized that. They fought quite often.
“When Kitty and I got together, it took a lot of people by surprise; Tina especially. Kitty was reluctant to take our relationship public at first, so against my wishes, Tina publicly embarrassed her about it. Ostensibly she did it to protect me, but really she did it just to gaslight her. It blew up her face when Kitty confessed her feelings, and agreed to be my girlfriend in front of the entire club. Tina was pissed!”
Quinn nodded. She’d heard about the incident through the grapevine. Tina had really turned into a bitch after Mike had graduated and she’d dumped him.
“When I graduated,” Artie continued, “I had every intention of maintaining a long distance relationship with Kitty. She’d agreed to one from the get go because we didn’t start dating until April, and I was graduating in June. But Tina convinced me to break up with her because it wasn’t fair to her, using the many failed post graduation relationships in glee club as evidence to support her argument. I didn’t want to do it, but eventually she managed to get me to see it her way, and I broke up with Kitty a few days before moving to New York for college.
“It was arguably the biggest mistake in my life to that point,” he continued. “It was one of the very few times I ever saw Kitty cry. When we came back a year and a half later, she was still angry and very bitter at all of us, but me especially.” Quinn nodded, remembering that day on the football field when the two of them, along with Brittany and Santana had tried to recruit some cheerleaders and football players into the newly reformed New Directions, only to be ambushed by Kitty. “It took awhile for us to become cordial again, and we spent some time at Brittany and Santana’s engagement party and several hours afterward getting everything out in the open, and agreeing to try to be friends again.
“Kitty was, and probably still is, a very guarded person, and as it turned out that she actually secretly liked me for months before we got closer during the school shooting, and later when she conspired with mom to get me to get up the courage to accept my acceptance into film school in New York. Getting together officially during the first glee club Beatles week was mostly a formality, because we both knew that we liked each other.
“When I broke up with her, it traumatized and scarred her deeply. It took a lot of time and apologizing on my part, but we were just finally getting back to the point of being close friends again at Brittany and Santana’s wedding. I found out later that she was almost ready to try dating again, but I didn’t see the signals that she was sending me.
“As you may have heard, Tina proposed to Mike before the wedding and he turned her down flat,” Quinn nodded, inwardly cursing the Yale professor who would not work with her over the group project date that had prevented her from attending the wedding of four of her closest friends. “A couple days later the two of us were commiserating when I got the bright idea to enter into one of those ‘if neither of us are married in ten years’ agreements, which she readily agreed to.” Quinn and Artie both shook their heads at that. “My only excuse is temporary insanity, because I was feeling sorry for myself there, and so was she. We both went back to our colleges, and I mostly forgot about it.
“After Kitty graduated from McKinley, we decided to try dating again. She moved to New York, and we were happy together for a while. But eventually we had an argument about her career – she turned down a role in a film I was doing because I had originally intended the role for Mercedes, who couldn’t do it because she was on the World Tour with Beyoncé.
“Eventually I cast Tina in the role, and during the time we spent together working on the film she convinced me to completely break up with Kitty and be with her; maybe even move the timeline of our ten year agreement – which I had almost completely forgotten about – up a few years. Tina and I dated for about two years until Mike came calling, shortly after Rachel won her first Tony, and you know the rest….”
Quinn did indeed know the rest. Tina dumped Artie again. Mike and Tina had begun dating shortly thereafter, and were engaged a few months after that. They had married after less than a year of being back together, and were now raising three children on the east coast.
“Do you still have regrets about breaking up with Kitty?” Quinn asked. “Is it possible that you still harbor feelings for her?”
Artie looked at Quinn, seeing where she was going with this.
“I have a lot of regrets in life,” he told her. “I think we all do. But the past is the past. We can’t go back and change it, no matter how much we may want to. I regret how much I hurt her, and I’ll probably always have some feelings for Tina, and Kitty, much as I’m sure you always will for Finn, and possibly Puck.” Quinn nodded. “But it’s in the past, and best left there.
“I’d rather focus on the future, and that little bundle of joy inside of your abdomen.” They smiled at each other and she leaned in and kissed his cheek.
She lay her head on his chest and a few minutes later they both drifted off to sleep.
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Author’s Note: Everyone have your tissues? I know I do, even after just proofreading this for publication!