Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 73rd cycle. Now cycle 74!

"The New and the Old"
((Older) Brittany/Santana &) Quinn/Spencer (OC)
Trinity series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

The date had been firmly squeezed into her thoughts even before they'd left, before they'd faked their deaths and left New York. She knew when Santana was due to give birth to hers and Brittany's baby, and whether or not she was planning to remember it, when the month had come along, as soon as they'd turned that calendar page, it was all she could think about. Every time she saw a baby, she wondered what theirs would look like, every time she saw a pregnant woman, she thought it was her, and if ever the phone rang late at night, she would startle and think they were calling to say it was time and they were going to the hospital.

But of course she wouldn't know what the baby would look like, and it was never Santana that she saw, nor was it them on the other end of the line… Nor would it ever be. It couldn't be. That never stopped her from fretting.

Spencer would tell her that he understood what she was going through, and she would give him a small smile, or a nod, or a hug, but deep down all she could think about was that, no, he didn't know what she was going through. He had known Santana and Brittany, yes, for a little while, but she didn't see how he could know exactly what those girls meant to her. They're not girls anymore, they're women, but they'll always be girls to me, my girls, my best friends.

Thinking about them, a lot of the time, she would think about her life without them, before they'd been reunited and they'd joined up to form Trinity.

She remembered her life working this job all on her own. It really was that, me on my own.

She'd been keeping a very private life, she felt she had to, with what she'd gotten herself into. With the money she'd make and no one else to split it with, she was living enough at ease that she didn't need to work, which meant that, if she wasn't on a job, more often than not, she was at home. She didn't interact so much with her neighbors, didn't want them to come prying into her life or for them to get to know her enough that they might start to ask themselves questions. They would find it strange that their neighbor seemed to be home a lot of the time, except for when she would disappear for days at a time. It was better that they didn't know her, that they'd almost go on believing that her home was vacant and no one lived there.

She would constantly be looking for clients, for opportunities for her to do what she'd taken on as her trade, and for a while she was in such high demand that she might not return to her home for weeks at a time.

Sooner or later though, she would return, to her home, where she lived alone. Always it would be the same, coming up those steps, to that door, stepping through and shutting the door again to find herself in total silence, no one waiting for her, no one to call and let know that she had made it back safely. No one knew her, so who would care?

It had lasted long enough that for a while she had managed to delude herself into thinking she didn't mind the solitude, that it actually helped her. She was burrowed so deep into her little world, that she couldn't see beyond it.

Then she'd found them, or they'd found her, depending on how you looked at it, and at first she had resisted the possibility that they might become part of what she had built for herself, even though the moment they had met up her heart had felt as though it was coming out of hibernation, bursting through the ground. She had resisted, because she didn't think it would be possible that they might sacrifice what she knew must be sacrificed, all to work with her. Just goes to show how little I knew…

She could have left them behind, disappeared again and never contacted them. It would have been easy, she thought, only it didn't feel easy. It felt like she'd have to give up an even bigger part of her soul, and that there wouldn't be a next time, another chance. It was now or never. There would be consequences, she knew. She had her fees, and she had always believed them reasonable. If she took on Santana and Brittany, those fees would have to be split in three, and even though she could raise the price, she would never want it to be too much; that wasn't why she was doing it. So in taking them on, in effect, she would be losing this 'privilege' of not needing to work… She hadn't blinked twice. She would have been glad to work again, and she was… until she'd been forced to leave her job behind when she and Spencer had 'died.'

She didn't know that she'd ever told them how much they had saved her life back in New York, not for the sake of physical damage, but down in her actual soul. She didn't know that she'd said it, and now she would never get to say it. She kept her salvation very close to herself, wouldn't ever dare forget it.

So now here she was, and far across the country, her girls would be on the verge of becoming mothers. They would be great parents, she didn't doubt it. They had raised her, from the creature of solitude she had been, on to the woman she'd become, fiercely protective of those people she'd let into her heart.

One night, it would come. The phone wouldn't ring, but even then, as far from them as she was, Quinn would swear that she'd felt it, and she knew that back there, way over in New York, a new life was about to start.

THE END

A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.
In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are
always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!