![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellydashTitle: Let Nothing You Dismay (4/5)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ellydash
Characters: Sue Sylvester, Terri Schuester, Kurt Hummel, Rachel Berry, Finn Hudson, Will Schuester, Jean Sylvester, Brittany Pierce, Artie Abrams, Tina Cohen-Chang, Noah Puckerman
Rating: PG-13
Warnings for this chapter: None
Spoilers: None
Word Count: 2,679
Note: Almost at the end! Thank you so much to everyone who's read and commented so far - I appreciate your feedback more than I can say.
Summary: Three spirits take Sue Sylvester to visit Christmases past, present and future. A Glee-flavored retelling of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol."
Chapter One: Wherein Kurt Hummel Extends an Invitation and Immediately Regrets It; Rachel Berry and Finn Hudson are Good – if Ineffective and Misguided – Samaritans; Sue Sylvester Receives an Unexpected Visitor
Chapter Two: Wherein a Spirit that Bears A Striking Resemblance to Kurt Hummel Escorts Sue Sylvester through Previous Christmases, and Sue Sylvester is Not Happy, but Then Again, When is She, Honestly
Chapter Three: Wherein the Brittany Pierce of Christmas Present Redecorates Sue’s Spare Bedroom; Rachel Berry Convenes a Meeting with Puck, Artie and Tina; Finn Hudson Invites a Reluctant Will Schuester to Christmas Dinner at the Hummel-Hudson’s.
Chapter Four: Wherein the Olivia Newton-John of Christmas Future Harrows Sue with Visions of What Is Yet To Be
Something’s wrong.
Nothing, of course, has been precisely right since Terri Schuester made her appearance in Sue’s living room with a blown-apart jaw and a boredom-induced plan, but this is different. This breaks the pattern of the last two nights: her new normal, where she wakes up in her bed at one in the morning and speaks to dead duplicates of her students.
Sue finds herself in the middle of an empty hallway at McKinley, a hallway she should recognize. She knows these hallways, intimately, better than she knows the map of the thin gray veins on the back of her hands. She’s studied the McKinley blueprints for enough years, stalked countless students through and around these simple routes, planted microphones and cameras and – on one particularly serious occasion that called for extreme measures – an acetone tricycloperoxyde-based explosive device. But this hallway’s off. It’s close to right, but it misses the mark. The lockers are the wrong color. The drinking fountain’s missing.
There’s pressure on her shoulder, a thin, hard hand, and it’s entirely thanks to her black ops training that Sue resists the temptation to exclaim in surprise. She turns instead, a quick smooth spin on her heel, and when she sees who’s come to meet her she exhales a short huff of breath, a sound like incredulity.
Olivia Newton-John. Or, Sue supposes, some kind of ghost thing that’s assumed the body of Olivia Newton-John, for God knows what reason. Kurt and Brittany: at least that made some vaguely-defined sense. They’re hers, her winners, her kids (no matter that she’d sooner stick pins in her eyes or have dinner with Kathie Lee Gifford than admit to any feelings of possessiveness). But Olivia? All Olivia’s ever done for her is renege on residuals and mock Sue's celebrity status, all while using what Sue is pretty sure is a blatantly phony accent. No one really sounds like that. Australia probably isn’t even real, just a PR sob story of a country made up to get legions of Grease watchers and Xanadu repentants feeling sympathetic.
Olivia looks back at her, clearly unintimidated by Sue’s scowl. She’s wearing all black, a simple outfit that looks more like a stagehand’s uniform than the wardrobe of an international recording artist and movie star (although Sue might argue that ‘movie star’ is a descriptor Olivia has in no way earned, and that ‘coked-up princess of autotune’ would be a more fitting title).
“Well?” Sue asks, sharply. “What’ve you got to show me?”
Olivia raises her hand and points, behind Sue, to the trophy case.
Most of the cups and plaques and ribbons are familiar to her like her own flesh. These are her brass children, her joys, born out of her immutable union with excellence. 2008 NATIONAL CHAMPIONS, MCKINLEY HIGH CHEERIOS. SUE SYLVESTER, COACH. 2009 NATIONALS. 2010 NATIONALS. Then, a series of new trophies: 2011 NATIONALS. 2012 NATIONALS. 2013 NATIONALS.
2013?
Olivia draws her finger along the glass, towards the far right of the case, extending Sue’s line of vision. What she sees there is her first real indicator of what she’s known since she opened her eyes in this deserted McKinley hallway: something is very, very wrong.
The next trophy is a smaller cup. Sue doesn’t recognize it at first. It’s been years since she’s had occasion to look at a second place trophy. She curls her lip in revulsion – second place, as far as she’s concerned, is as good as last place – and squints to read the inscription; it’s hard, without her glasses.
Which is why she forces herself to read it again, not sure she’s seeing the right words.
2014 TRI STATE RUNNER-UP, MCKINLEY HIGH CHEERIOS, the inscription reads. MAGGIE BEAM, COACH.
Sue whirls on Olivia, her jaw hanging in shock. “The only acceptable explanation for my name not being on this trophy,” she snarls, “would be the appointment of my future self by President Palin to the position of Secretary of Defense. Which, considering the highly sensitive, revealing and sexually-explicit emails I currently have in my possession, is a lot more likely than you might think.”
Olivia shakes her head, slowly.
“Maggie Beam,” Sue exhales. “That perky Xenadrine popper who coaches over at Lima High? No way in hell she’d ever replace me. Maggie Beam thinks a winning cheer routine is a couple of toe touch jumps and thigh stands set to Toni Basil. Brad Childress made better coaching calls, for God’s sake.” She looks back at the trophy case. There’s another cup there, one she’d missed on her first, quick hungry scan. 2011 GLEE CLUB NATIONALS, FIRST PLACE. NEW DIRECTIONS, MCKINLEY HIGH. WILLIAM SCHUESTER, DIRECTOR.
Well. So the Lollipop Guild had managed to eke out a win, despite Will Schuester’s crippling involvement. Maybe he’d finally realized that preparing for a competition meant selecting material and rehearsing months in advance, and dividing up songs not based on self-selected pairs of glee clubbers playing park the beef bus in tuna town with each other, but on which voices actually best fit together. (If it were up to her – not that Sue would ever, ever admit she’s spent her valuable time considering this – she’d fuse the astonishing egos of Hummel and Berry into a dueling duo. Give them some Sondheim, maybe. Santana, Mercedes and that wheelchair kid could do something interesting with TLC. It never ceases to amaze her how poorly Schuester manipulates the talent he’s been so unfairly granted.)
She looks at the etching of her name on the 2013 trophy. Her last trophy.
“What happened?” she asks Olivia, insistent. “What happened to me? And why in Madonna's holy name won’t you talk? I mean, we both know you sound completely ridiculous, but it’s not like that’s ever stopped you."
Olivia draws her pinched thumb and forefinger across her lips, the sign for zipped shut. Sue watches her face carefully, looking for what she’d seen in Fake Kurt and Imitation Brittany: some kind of warmth, a little understanding. It’s not there. Olivia’s expression is grim, and suddenly Sue is glad Olivia is silent, because she doesn’t think she wants to listen to what Olivia might have to say.
If I’m not here anymore, then where the hell am I?
Maybe Olivia hears her, because she places her cold hand between Sue’s shoulder blades, pressing her gently forward, down the hall, towards the door that leads outside.
__
She knows the answer to her question once she sees the gravestones lining the cemetery hill. It’s a bitterly cold morning, the dead ground laced with ice, and Sue wraps her arms around herself, shivering, shaking.
Olivia indicates towards two figures standing together, swathed in heavy jackets, looking down at one particular stone. Sue peers at their red faces, flushed with cold, and pushes on towards them, unable to stop herself. Will. It’s Will. Older, and his lined, coarse face shows it, but it’s Will. And that tall man with a pursed mouth and the Hermès scarf –
“Kurt,” she exhales, forgetting all her nicknames for him in that sharp, keening moment of recognition. Her bitchy, condescending elf of a student, somehow now this grown stranger. The vertigo of his transformation is disorienting, far more dramatic than Will’s gentle aging.
She can hear their voices, pitched low for graveside appropriateness.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make the service,” Kurt’s saying, and he really does sound regretful. “I couldn’t get the time off of work, and I can’t afford to push any buttons – they’re looking for any excuse to let staff go right now. Honestly, I was lucky to get the half week off for Christmas.”
“I understand. Really, I do. I know you would’ve come if you could’ve.” There’s just the slightest stress on the first ‘you,’ and Sue wonders what Will’s inferring. Who else was invited to this service? Who wasn’t there? “I think she’d appreciate the fact that you’re here now.”
She doesn’t look at the gravestone. Not yet. She knows what’s written there. She doesn’t need to see it.
“So. Mr. Schue.” Kurt’s clearly uncomfortable, scuffs the ground a bit with his impeccable boot. “Finn says glee club isn’t around anymore? That's a shame.”
“Call me Will, Kurt. Please. Oh, it was never really the same after you kids graduated. There was some interest, but no one committed enough or, frankly, talented enough to keep the momentum going.” He looks down at the grave. “You know, once Figgins officially declared the club dead, she hired the Lima Chorale to stand outside my office and sing the Hallelujah Chorus. I’m not sure she really appreciated the irony.”
Kurt smiles, faintly. “Probably not. Irony was never her strong suit.”
“At least they sounded great,” Will adds, with a crooked half-grin.
And avoiding humiliation was never your strong suit, Kurt clearly wants to say, but doesn’t. “I heard about her retirement, all those years back,” he offers, instead. “Dad emailed me a link to an article on the Lima Ledger. I never figured she’d voluntarily give up her job.”
“She didn’t. Not exactly.”
Will tells stories like they’re monologues, like they're his last, best chance to perform. He sighs, turns to face his former student, looking appropriately dejected as befits a recital of the Tragedy of Sue Sylvester. Sue’s got her epic eye-rolling all prepared; her pupils are contracting in ready anticipation, and that’s when his first sentence impacts her like a fist to the solar plexus. She’s suddenly reaching for breath. Dizzy. Her chest aches. She hears fragments.
“It was after her sister died. Wouldn’t answer her door for nearly a week. When she came back to work she was – well, different. Weirdly quiet. We tried, you know. Emma and Shannon and I. We stopped by her office to tell her how sorry we were and if there was anything we could do – you know. In retrospect it was a pretty weak effort, I suppose. She wouldn’t look at us, at first. I remember Emma said something like she could imagine how painful this was for Sue, to lose someone so special. She turned to face Emma then, and her expression – God, there was something just awful about it. Made my stomach turn over.”
The worst of it is that Sue can see this happening. The Three Stooges, she thinks, sneering. Curly, Princess Mononoke, and One Hit Wanda the Roller Derby Queen, all of them feeling just so goddamned sorry for me. Thinking they could actually make it better, make something like finally losing Jean – and the barbed thought is too sharp; she can’t keep it alive, and she curls her fingers into her thighs, nails digging little crescents through the polyester of her track suit pants. The sting is good. Reassuring.
“She told us to get out, and we did. She avoided me – all of us – after that. No teasing. No nicknames. No more jokes about my hair. Didn’t seem to have any interest in anything but her Cheerios and winning and Nationals. And then a few months later Jessica Paley had that heart attack during practice.”
Kurt’s face registers surprise.
“Didn’t you hear about that? I would’ve guessed someone – Finn – would’ve told you. I think he knew Jessica. She was a few years behind you guys.”
“I was – pretty busy trying to establish a new life for myself during college,” Kurt says, hesitantly. “A new start. Finn and I didn’t see or talk to each other much during the school year.”
Will makes an affirmative noise that’s supposed to indicate he understands, when he clearly doesn’t. “Anyway,” he continues, quickly, “it all came out then. What Sue’d been doing to her squad – the liquid diets, the weigh-ins. She’d doubled the number of practice hours, and I guess the kids’ bodies couldn’t take it. Jessica’s parents were furious, and Figgins managed, for maybe the first time ever, to untie his hands, so Sue got suspended.”
Sue’s mouth stings with dread, tanging on her tongue like copper.
“The school board ruled that she’d only be allowed to return if her budget was drastically reduced, and if she’d accept the appointment of an assistant coach. She refused. Resigned.”
“Hardly shocking,” Kurt observes. “Coach Sylvester would rather set a routine to the greatest hits of Pat Boone than accept a glorified hall monitor policing her practices.”
“I figured she thought they’d call her bluff. But they didn’t. Figgins hired Maggie Beam a few days later.” Will scuffs his shoe in the dirt, pushing earth toward the grave edge. “Not much more to it than that. I saw her around over the years. In the supermarket. Once at the park, sitting at a picnic table. She stopped wearing her track suits, you know.”
Kurt’s eyes widen. “No,” he gasps. This, somehow, is clearly the most horrifying thing to him: the loss of Sue’s battle armor, the peeling of her skin. Sue, watching, reacts with similar dismay, pressing her hand over her heart, feeling the smooth slide of her jacket.
Will nods. “Yeah. Weird seeing her in civilian clothes. She looked smaller, somehow. Diminished.”
Sue tries to do some quick math in her head, but she’s missing some important numbers. If she’d resigned (lost) her job maybe a year or two after Hummel and the rest of Schuester’s muppet babies graduated McKinley – all those years back, Kurt had said. How many years? How long had she existed, stripped of everything she valued?
She forces herself to look down at the flat slab of granite with her name on it, with her year of birth and her year of reckoning.
Thirteen years, she realizes, staring at the numbers. The horror of it fills her throat and chest. Thirteen years without carving beautiful geometry from the gawky, malleable bodies of teenagers; without waging war in overbuilt gymnasiums with confetti cannons and sparklers; without joyfully mocking Will Schuester’s hideous lifestyle choices.
Thirteen years without her Jeanie.
The inscription below her name does not read LEGEND, as her will currently requests, or EVEN DECAYING, I’M STILL BETTER THAN YOU, the other option she’s considered, but a simple and plain BELOVED SISTER.
“She’d listed me as her next of kin,” Will’s saying, softly. “I took care of things, picked out the marker – I thought she’d like that inscription. I put the funeral service together, contacted some of her former students, some other people she used to spend time with. In the end, it was just me, Emma and Becky Jackson – you remember Becky, right? No one else came.”
Sue’s not listening. She’s staring at the grave next to hers, a darker stone with sharper lettering.
JEAN SYLVESTER
1957-2013
ALWAYS
“I can’t,” she says out loud, her voice cracking, and sinks to her knees, touching the frozen granite. Olivia’s impassive face watches her. “Believe me when I say this, Newton-John, or whatever you are, because right now I’m as about as serious as a Very Special Episode of Diff’rent Strokes about child molestation. I can’t live like that. I won’t.”
She looks from Olivia to Will, whose features are twisted in pity, pity she knows is specially reserved for poor dead Sue Sylvester. The horror of Will Schuester, of all people, pitying her – it’s like monkeys evolving from humans or a Republican senator inclined towards compromise: a monstrous crime of nature.
She imagines Will watching her depleted self wander the aisles at the supermarket, imagines him placidly arranging her funeral (next of kin? she wonders, briefly, distracted. Why the hell had she ever given him that honor?), thinks of him in bed at night spooning against jellyfish Emma, sighing poor Sue, poor poor woman, what an awful way to go, all alone.
As always, it's Will who gives her the resolve she needs.
“Give me your freakishly cold hand, Xanadon’t,” Sue demands, clearing her throat. “If there’s anything that I’ve learned from the Queen of Pop – not you, Newton-John, the Material Girl – it’s that every once in a while, you’ve got to reinvent yourself. Also offend the Pope and establish an enormous gay following, but I can do that later.”
She grabs for Olivia’s hand, pulls herself up off Jean’s gravestone, and the rush of the movement catapults her into and through Olivia, through the black of Olivia’s clothes into the black of her bedroom, into the dark of her sheets and her pillow, still warm.
Chapter Five
Author:
ellydash Characters: Sue Sylvester, Terri Schuester, Kurt Hummel, Rachel Berry, Finn Hudson, Will Schuester, Jean Sylvester, Brittany Pierce, Artie Abrams, Tina Cohen-Chang, Noah Puckerman
Rating: PG-13
Warnings for this chapter: None
Spoilers: None
Word Count: 2,679
Note: Almost at the end! Thank you so much to everyone who's read and commented so far - I appreciate your feedback more than I can say.
Summary: Three spirits take Sue Sylvester to visit Christmases past, present and future. A Glee-flavored retelling of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol."
Chapter One: Wherein Kurt Hummel Extends an Invitation and Immediately Regrets It; Rachel Berry and Finn Hudson are Good – if Ineffective and Misguided – Samaritans; Sue Sylvester Receives an Unexpected Visitor
Chapter Two: Wherein a Spirit that Bears A Striking Resemblance to Kurt Hummel Escorts Sue Sylvester through Previous Christmases, and Sue Sylvester is Not Happy, but Then Again, When is She, Honestly
Chapter Three: Wherein the Brittany Pierce of Christmas Present Redecorates Sue’s Spare Bedroom; Rachel Berry Convenes a Meeting with Puck, Artie and Tina; Finn Hudson Invites a Reluctant Will Schuester to Christmas Dinner at the Hummel-Hudson’s.
Chapter Four: Wherein the Olivia Newton-John of Christmas Future Harrows Sue with Visions of What Is Yet To Be
Something’s wrong.
Nothing, of course, has been precisely right since Terri Schuester made her appearance in Sue’s living room with a blown-apart jaw and a boredom-induced plan, but this is different. This breaks the pattern of the last two nights: her new normal, where she wakes up in her bed at one in the morning and speaks to dead duplicates of her students.
Sue finds herself in the middle of an empty hallway at McKinley, a hallway she should recognize. She knows these hallways, intimately, better than she knows the map of the thin gray veins on the back of her hands. She’s studied the McKinley blueprints for enough years, stalked countless students through and around these simple routes, planted microphones and cameras and – on one particularly serious occasion that called for extreme measures – an acetone tricycloperoxyde-based explosive device. But this hallway’s off. It’s close to right, but it misses the mark. The lockers are the wrong color. The drinking fountain’s missing.
There’s pressure on her shoulder, a thin, hard hand, and it’s entirely thanks to her black ops training that Sue resists the temptation to exclaim in surprise. She turns instead, a quick smooth spin on her heel, and when she sees who’s come to meet her she exhales a short huff of breath, a sound like incredulity.
Olivia Newton-John. Or, Sue supposes, some kind of ghost thing that’s assumed the body of Olivia Newton-John, for God knows what reason. Kurt and Brittany: at least that made some vaguely-defined sense. They’re hers, her winners, her kids (no matter that she’d sooner stick pins in her eyes or have dinner with Kathie Lee Gifford than admit to any feelings of possessiveness). But Olivia? All Olivia’s ever done for her is renege on residuals and mock Sue's celebrity status, all while using what Sue is pretty sure is a blatantly phony accent. No one really sounds like that. Australia probably isn’t even real, just a PR sob story of a country made up to get legions of Grease watchers and Xanadu repentants feeling sympathetic.
Olivia looks back at her, clearly unintimidated by Sue’s scowl. She’s wearing all black, a simple outfit that looks more like a stagehand’s uniform than the wardrobe of an international recording artist and movie star (although Sue might argue that ‘movie star’ is a descriptor Olivia has in no way earned, and that ‘coked-up princess of autotune’ would be a more fitting title).
“Well?” Sue asks, sharply. “What’ve you got to show me?”
Olivia raises her hand and points, behind Sue, to the trophy case.
Most of the cups and plaques and ribbons are familiar to her like her own flesh. These are her brass children, her joys, born out of her immutable union with excellence. 2008 NATIONAL CHAMPIONS, MCKINLEY HIGH CHEERIOS. SUE SYLVESTER, COACH. 2009 NATIONALS. 2010 NATIONALS. Then, a series of new trophies: 2011 NATIONALS. 2012 NATIONALS. 2013 NATIONALS.
2013?
Olivia draws her finger along the glass, towards the far right of the case, extending Sue’s line of vision. What she sees there is her first real indicator of what she’s known since she opened her eyes in this deserted McKinley hallway: something is very, very wrong.
The next trophy is a smaller cup. Sue doesn’t recognize it at first. It’s been years since she’s had occasion to look at a second place trophy. She curls her lip in revulsion – second place, as far as she’s concerned, is as good as last place – and squints to read the inscription; it’s hard, without her glasses.
Which is why she forces herself to read it again, not sure she’s seeing the right words.
2014 TRI STATE RUNNER-UP, MCKINLEY HIGH CHEERIOS, the inscription reads. MAGGIE BEAM, COACH.
Sue whirls on Olivia, her jaw hanging in shock. “The only acceptable explanation for my name not being on this trophy,” she snarls, “would be the appointment of my future self by President Palin to the position of Secretary of Defense. Which, considering the highly sensitive, revealing and sexually-explicit emails I currently have in my possession, is a lot more likely than you might think.”
Olivia shakes her head, slowly.
“Maggie Beam,” Sue exhales. “That perky Xenadrine popper who coaches over at Lima High? No way in hell she’d ever replace me. Maggie Beam thinks a winning cheer routine is a couple of toe touch jumps and thigh stands set to Toni Basil. Brad Childress made better coaching calls, for God’s sake.” She looks back at the trophy case. There’s another cup there, one she’d missed on her first, quick hungry scan. 2011 GLEE CLUB NATIONALS, FIRST PLACE. NEW DIRECTIONS, MCKINLEY HIGH. WILLIAM SCHUESTER, DIRECTOR.
Well. So the Lollipop Guild had managed to eke out a win, despite Will Schuester’s crippling involvement. Maybe he’d finally realized that preparing for a competition meant selecting material and rehearsing months in advance, and dividing up songs not based on self-selected pairs of glee clubbers playing park the beef bus in tuna town with each other, but on which voices actually best fit together. (If it were up to her – not that Sue would ever, ever admit she’s spent her valuable time considering this – she’d fuse the astonishing egos of Hummel and Berry into a dueling duo. Give them some Sondheim, maybe. Santana, Mercedes and that wheelchair kid could do something interesting with TLC. It never ceases to amaze her how poorly Schuester manipulates the talent he’s been so unfairly granted.)
She looks at the etching of her name on the 2013 trophy. Her last trophy.
“What happened?” she asks Olivia, insistent. “What happened to me? And why in Madonna's holy name won’t you talk? I mean, we both know you sound completely ridiculous, but it’s not like that’s ever stopped you."
Olivia draws her pinched thumb and forefinger across her lips, the sign for zipped shut. Sue watches her face carefully, looking for what she’d seen in Fake Kurt and Imitation Brittany: some kind of warmth, a little understanding. It’s not there. Olivia’s expression is grim, and suddenly Sue is glad Olivia is silent, because she doesn’t think she wants to listen to what Olivia might have to say.
If I’m not here anymore, then where the hell am I?
Maybe Olivia hears her, because she places her cold hand between Sue’s shoulder blades, pressing her gently forward, down the hall, towards the door that leads outside.
__
She knows the answer to her question once she sees the gravestones lining the cemetery hill. It’s a bitterly cold morning, the dead ground laced with ice, and Sue wraps her arms around herself, shivering, shaking.
Olivia indicates towards two figures standing together, swathed in heavy jackets, looking down at one particular stone. Sue peers at their red faces, flushed with cold, and pushes on towards them, unable to stop herself. Will. It’s Will. Older, and his lined, coarse face shows it, but it’s Will. And that tall man with a pursed mouth and the Hermès scarf –
“Kurt,” she exhales, forgetting all her nicknames for him in that sharp, keening moment of recognition. Her bitchy, condescending elf of a student, somehow now this grown stranger. The vertigo of his transformation is disorienting, far more dramatic than Will’s gentle aging.
She can hear their voices, pitched low for graveside appropriateness.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make the service,” Kurt’s saying, and he really does sound regretful. “I couldn’t get the time off of work, and I can’t afford to push any buttons – they’re looking for any excuse to let staff go right now. Honestly, I was lucky to get the half week off for Christmas.”
“I understand. Really, I do. I know you would’ve come if you could’ve.” There’s just the slightest stress on the first ‘you,’ and Sue wonders what Will’s inferring. Who else was invited to this service? Who wasn’t there? “I think she’d appreciate the fact that you’re here now.”
She doesn’t look at the gravestone. Not yet. She knows what’s written there. She doesn’t need to see it.
“So. Mr. Schue.” Kurt’s clearly uncomfortable, scuffs the ground a bit with his impeccable boot. “Finn says glee club isn’t around anymore? That's a shame.”
“Call me Will, Kurt. Please. Oh, it was never really the same after you kids graduated. There was some interest, but no one committed enough or, frankly, talented enough to keep the momentum going.” He looks down at the grave. “You know, once Figgins officially declared the club dead, she hired the Lima Chorale to stand outside my office and sing the Hallelujah Chorus. I’m not sure she really appreciated the irony.”
Kurt smiles, faintly. “Probably not. Irony was never her strong suit.”
“At least they sounded great,” Will adds, with a crooked half-grin.
And avoiding humiliation was never your strong suit, Kurt clearly wants to say, but doesn’t. “I heard about her retirement, all those years back,” he offers, instead. “Dad emailed me a link to an article on the Lima Ledger. I never figured she’d voluntarily give up her job.”
“She didn’t. Not exactly.”
Will tells stories like they’re monologues, like they're his last, best chance to perform. He sighs, turns to face his former student, looking appropriately dejected as befits a recital of the Tragedy of Sue Sylvester. Sue’s got her epic eye-rolling all prepared; her pupils are contracting in ready anticipation, and that’s when his first sentence impacts her like a fist to the solar plexus. She’s suddenly reaching for breath. Dizzy. Her chest aches. She hears fragments.
“It was after her sister died. Wouldn’t answer her door for nearly a week. When she came back to work she was – well, different. Weirdly quiet. We tried, you know. Emma and Shannon and I. We stopped by her office to tell her how sorry we were and if there was anything we could do – you know. In retrospect it was a pretty weak effort, I suppose. She wouldn’t look at us, at first. I remember Emma said something like she could imagine how painful this was for Sue, to lose someone so special. She turned to face Emma then, and her expression – God, there was something just awful about it. Made my stomach turn over.”
The worst of it is that Sue can see this happening. The Three Stooges, she thinks, sneering. Curly, Princess Mononoke, and One Hit Wanda the Roller Derby Queen, all of them feeling just so goddamned sorry for me. Thinking they could actually make it better, make something like finally losing Jean – and the barbed thought is too sharp; she can’t keep it alive, and she curls her fingers into her thighs, nails digging little crescents through the polyester of her track suit pants. The sting is good. Reassuring.
“She told us to get out, and we did. She avoided me – all of us – after that. No teasing. No nicknames. No more jokes about my hair. Didn’t seem to have any interest in anything but her Cheerios and winning and Nationals. And then a few months later Jessica Paley had that heart attack during practice.”
Kurt’s face registers surprise.
“Didn’t you hear about that? I would’ve guessed someone – Finn – would’ve told you. I think he knew Jessica. She was a few years behind you guys.”
“I was – pretty busy trying to establish a new life for myself during college,” Kurt says, hesitantly. “A new start. Finn and I didn’t see or talk to each other much during the school year.”
Will makes an affirmative noise that’s supposed to indicate he understands, when he clearly doesn’t. “Anyway,” he continues, quickly, “it all came out then. What Sue’d been doing to her squad – the liquid diets, the weigh-ins. She’d doubled the number of practice hours, and I guess the kids’ bodies couldn’t take it. Jessica’s parents were furious, and Figgins managed, for maybe the first time ever, to untie his hands, so Sue got suspended.”
Sue’s mouth stings with dread, tanging on her tongue like copper.
“The school board ruled that she’d only be allowed to return if her budget was drastically reduced, and if she’d accept the appointment of an assistant coach. She refused. Resigned.”
“Hardly shocking,” Kurt observes. “Coach Sylvester would rather set a routine to the greatest hits of Pat Boone than accept a glorified hall monitor policing her practices.”
“I figured she thought they’d call her bluff. But they didn’t. Figgins hired Maggie Beam a few days later.” Will scuffs his shoe in the dirt, pushing earth toward the grave edge. “Not much more to it than that. I saw her around over the years. In the supermarket. Once at the park, sitting at a picnic table. She stopped wearing her track suits, you know.”
Kurt’s eyes widen. “No,” he gasps. This, somehow, is clearly the most horrifying thing to him: the loss of Sue’s battle armor, the peeling of her skin. Sue, watching, reacts with similar dismay, pressing her hand over her heart, feeling the smooth slide of her jacket.
Will nods. “Yeah. Weird seeing her in civilian clothes. She looked smaller, somehow. Diminished.”
Sue tries to do some quick math in her head, but she’s missing some important numbers. If she’d resigned (lost) her job maybe a year or two after Hummel and the rest of Schuester’s muppet babies graduated McKinley – all those years back, Kurt had said. How many years? How long had she existed, stripped of everything she valued?
She forces herself to look down at the flat slab of granite with her name on it, with her year of birth and her year of reckoning.
Thirteen years, she realizes, staring at the numbers. The horror of it fills her throat and chest. Thirteen years without carving beautiful geometry from the gawky, malleable bodies of teenagers; without waging war in overbuilt gymnasiums with confetti cannons and sparklers; without joyfully mocking Will Schuester’s hideous lifestyle choices.
Thirteen years without her Jeanie.
The inscription below her name does not read LEGEND, as her will currently requests, or EVEN DECAYING, I’M STILL BETTER THAN YOU, the other option she’s considered, but a simple and plain BELOVED SISTER.
“She’d listed me as her next of kin,” Will’s saying, softly. “I took care of things, picked out the marker – I thought she’d like that inscription. I put the funeral service together, contacted some of her former students, some other people she used to spend time with. In the end, it was just me, Emma and Becky Jackson – you remember Becky, right? No one else came.”
Sue’s not listening. She’s staring at the grave next to hers, a darker stone with sharper lettering.
JEAN SYLVESTER
1957-2013
ALWAYS
“I can’t,” she says out loud, her voice cracking, and sinks to her knees, touching the frozen granite. Olivia’s impassive face watches her. “Believe me when I say this, Newton-John, or whatever you are, because right now I’m as about as serious as a Very Special Episode of Diff’rent Strokes about child molestation. I can’t live like that. I won’t.”
She looks from Olivia to Will, whose features are twisted in pity, pity she knows is specially reserved for poor dead Sue Sylvester. The horror of Will Schuester, of all people, pitying her – it’s like monkeys evolving from humans or a Republican senator inclined towards compromise: a monstrous crime of nature.
She imagines Will watching her depleted self wander the aisles at the supermarket, imagines him placidly arranging her funeral (next of kin? she wonders, briefly, distracted. Why the hell had she ever given him that honor?), thinks of him in bed at night spooning against jellyfish Emma, sighing poor Sue, poor poor woman, what an awful way to go, all alone.
As always, it's Will who gives her the resolve she needs.
“Give me your freakishly cold hand, Xanadon’t,” Sue demands, clearing her throat. “If there’s anything that I’ve learned from the Queen of Pop – not you, Newton-John, the Material Girl – it’s that every once in a while, you’ve got to reinvent yourself. Also offend the Pope and establish an enormous gay following, but I can do that later.”
She grabs for Olivia’s hand, pulls herself up off Jean’s gravestone, and the rush of the movement catapults her into and through Olivia, through the black of Olivia’s clothes into the black of her bedroom, into the dark of her sheets and her pillow, still warm.
Chapter Five
