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 75th cycle. Now cycle 76!


"One Year of Allie & Tommy"
(Older (Santana/Brittany)) Quinn/Spencer (OC), Sophia (OC; Nellie V)
Trinity series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

She never would have expected for the months to go by so fast. The first one had gone by at a snail's pace, the second one less so, admittedly… But regardless of that, the day she woke up and realized a year had gone by since she and Spencer had left both New York City and their old lives behind, she was stunned. Even Spencer, when he woke, turned to look at her with silent contemplation. One year.

"Does it make it like… our birthday?" he'd said, and it only sounded halfway like a joke.

"We've had a lot of those, haven't we? Yours, mine, Tommy's, Allie's…" she pointed out, smiling.

"It'll be just between us," he promised. She chuckled, scooting nearer to him and putting her arm around him while her head rested to his shoulder.

After they'd left New York, she had not believed they would manage to make themselves any sort of life that could compare to what they had before. They were being forced to give up everything, home, family, friends, their entire life stories, their names… They had to create Allie and Tommy from the ground up, and although there was plenty in their pasts to supply them with the means to do it, there was a difference between a temporary cover and having the cover become your forever. What if they got it wrong? What if they contradicted themselves? What if they messed up so much that they gave themselves away and then it would all have been for nothing?

But then life, Allie and Tommy, they had surprised them. The home they made for themselves was actually one they didn't lament at all. They liked where they were, liked the people… They had made friends here, some of them almost as good as family. They couldn't pretend as though they didn't think about what they'd left behind, of course. Quinn constantly thought of her friends back in New York, and Spencer may not have said much, but she knew he missed plenty of things, too.

The longer they'd been in their new town though, they had allowed Allie and Tommy to become even more real for them. They had borrowed some of their stories from their own lives, anything that was uncomplicated and innocuous. But other things they had invented completely, and those things had become so ingrained in who they were that they could almost believe they had actually happened.

Quinn knew they had really become their new identities when it started to dawn on her that she wasn't as drawn to going back home, to her old life, as she used to be. Yes, she thought about Santana and Brittany, about their baby, who had to be somewhere around three months old by now. She thought about her family back in Ohio, about friends both new and old in New York. But they belonged to Quinn Fabray, and Quinn Fabray had died in a car accident one year ago today. She had no right to them anymore, and she wasn't in a rush to get back to them.

One day, maybe… One day they could find that the danger had passed, and it was alright for them to let people know they weren't dead, but could they really do that? Wasn't it better for them to leave them be? They had put their loved ones through so much, letting them believe that they had died, and going back to reveal that they had been alive all along would have felt cruel. They had made this decision, or rather had it made for them, and now that was how it was.

Now she was Allie, and she had her Tommy, holding her near. For the first time, she'd started to think about the future. Maybe they could get married, they could… have children. Children who will belong to Allie and Tommy… If they did have children though, what would it mean for them? They'd be in as much danger as they were, if anyone ever found out… But then what else were they supposed to do, wait forever, hold off on half of life, just in case?

Maybe in defiance to this, they had made love, right then and there. It probably wouldn't be that they'd get pregnant all at once, but they weren't afraid of the possibilities.

"What took you so long?" Sophia asked when they walked into the diner later that morning.

"Problem with the shower," Spencer lied, and Quinn smirked to herself.

"Right," Sophia frowned, unsure. "Well, I realized something yesterday, you want to know what it is?"

"Sure," Quinn nodded.

"I realized that in a couple of days, you two will have been here for a year," she told them, and they looked at each other, as though they were only realizing it themselves, ignoring the fact that they had remembered it, too, a week ago.

"You're right," Spencer told her.

"So I was thinking, there's open mic at the bar, and I've heard both of you sing a couple of times, you should come up and do a song or two with me," Sophia offered.

"Yeah, good luck getting him on a stage," Quinn chuckled, and Spencer gave her a playful shove.

"I'm not giving up," Sophia promised. "What about you then, Allie?"

"Tempting, but I think I'm going to pass, too," Quinn told her, with an apologetic smile. Quinn Fabray was a singer. I'm not Quinn Fabray.

"Oh, please?" Sophia insisted. "Doesn't have to be anything too hard," she went on.

"Alright, look, we'll think about it," Quinn finally had to relent. "Not making any promises, but… we'll think about it." After Sophia had left, she'd turned to Spencer. "What do you think?"

"I think… I think we've been here a year, so why not celebrate a bit? It beats sitting at home and wallowing," he shrugged, and she knew what he meant.

"Well, do you have anything in mind?" she asked.

"Not really, but you're the one who was in show choir."

"Right," she breathed, flashes of girls in colorful dresses and boys in ties going through her head. "Nothing by Journey."

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!