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 82nd cycle. Now cycle 83!

"Face & Consider"
Nora (AU!Beth)/Grace (OC), Emily (OC; Nellie V.)
Sunshine Girls 2 series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

As the party had drawn to a close, others had offered to stay and help clean, but Nora insisted they should go and that she and Grace, who would be sleeping over that night, could take care of it. They'd even booted Emily out, so she could go and spend more time with Kelly.

Nora had taken on the task of gathering the abandoned cups and other such things, while Grace took care of gathering and putting away the leftover food. They had been very efficient about it, clearing the living room and dining room, where most of the party had gone down, although once this was done, they had made a tour of the house, knowing people had a way of wandering off.

"Pretty sure a couple people hooked up in the bathroom upstairs," Nora frowned, coming back down. Grace smirked to herself. "What, do you know…" she started to ask, and Grace tipped her head until Nora gasped, looking at the door as though she would somehow see their friend there. "Emily, seriously?" Grace said nothing, but she didn't have to. "Well, that's… that's… I don't know whether to be happy for her or a tiny bit freaked out."

"At least she didn't do it on your bed," Grace pointed out, and Nora looked like she'd already been trying to block out the image when the bathroom was involved, and now this only made it worse.

"Yeah… good… good thing," she picked up two trash bags to take down to the curb.

As she turned to head back into the house, she spotted Grace at the window, looking out, and Nora didn't have to follow her gaze anywhere to know where she was looking. She went back into the house, coming up behind her.

"Hey…" she slipped her arms around her waist, resting her chin on her shoulder. "You okay?" Grace leaned into the embrace, placing her hands over Nora's.

"I am," she promised.

"Thinking about going over there?" Nora asked her. Grace said nothing for a while, but finally she turned in Nora's arms so she could face her.

"Don't need to go anywhere. I'm good here," she smiled, and Nora softly kissed her.

"Sometimes it still stuns me that I get to do that," she gave her a smirk.

"Play your cards right, and you might get to do a lot more tonight," Grace told her, and Nora's eyebrows dipped up in a fashion very similar to her mother. "And I'm not saying this because I was thinking about my mother," she promised.

"Good, because that would have been weird," Nora joked, and Grace laughed. Her hands had found their way at the small of Nora's back, and the way she held on, Nora could have sworn that 'tonight' was about to turn into 'right now.' But then Grace spoke on.

"You know what though… I finally talked to my dad the other night."

"Yeah?" Nora asked.

"We hadn't talked since before this all started, he was out of the country on business… I told him what happened, the whole thing. I told him how… how she hit me, and Mr. Schuester offered to take me in and she let me go." The last words were tinged with the anger Nora knew went hand in hand with the day she'd left home. "I told him why it happened, that I was with you, that you were my girlfriend, and that I loved you," her eyes sparkled with the awareness that it was the first time she'd said it, and Nora wasn't without emotion of her own, reaching up and stroking Grace's cheek. She mouthed the words, 'love you, too,' and Grace kissed her. For a moment they remained as they were, foreheads touching, intimate in the stillness and nearness. "And he wasn't upset," Grace finally spoke again, and Nora looked at her.

"That's great," she smiled.

"I was so angry for a while, after he left…"

"I know," Nora remembered.

"And now this happens, and he's the one telling me that he's happy for me for having you, and that he would talk to my mother, and he's over there in Scotland and she's the one who's here, where I am."

"Yeah, that's…" She couldn't see how Grace had been trying to work up to saying something.

"He said if I wanted to go and live with him again, he'd buy me a ticket."

Nora blinked, looking at her in shock.

"With him… in Scotland?" she had to ask, like maybe she'd heard it wrong. Grace nodded.

"No, but I'm not going," she quickly added. "I could, but I don't want to. I want to stay here, with you," she promised.

It would be so easy to take this answer and hold on to it. If she did, then she got to keep her girlfriend, to take on these next steps in her life with her by her side. But here they were, and they'd just told each other they loved one another, and what was love if it wasn't putting your own needs aside for those of that person you loved?

"Don't you want to be able to be with your family though?" she had to ask. "I know you've missed them, your dad and your brother. If this is something that might mean you'd get to be with them, in your own home…" Grace looked at her like she couldn't believe she was saying this.

"I don't… I can't leave you," she shook her head. Nora brought her hands up to hold her face.

"I don't want you to leave me either, but you need to ask yourself where you'd really be better off. If it's here, then it's here, and we'll just carry on."

"And if it's back in Scotland?" Grace's voice was small.

"Then you need to go. Whatever we have to do to make things work after that, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Okay?" Grace nodded, her face still partly immobilized in Nora's hand. "I'll support you, whatever you decide, but don't just push that offer off the table until you know for sure."

"I won't," Grace promised.

When they went upstairs together, the door to Nora's bedroom shut, what happened there may not have been just as they'd envisioned it, but in a lot of ways maybe it was better. They were careful with one another, tender. Nora wanted to make Grace feel good, and she did, just as Grace wanted to show Nora how much she meant to her.

By the time Nora's parents and sisters returned home, they found a house as spotless as though there had never been a party at all, and they found the girls sleeping soundly in Nora's bed. If they had looked more closely they might have noticed the clothes on the ground, and the fact that the girls under the blankets had not a stitch on. Instead, they shut the door again and let them be.

Grace slept against Nora, with the blonde's arms around her, not unlike the way they'd been standing at the window earlier. She would have no bad dreams that night, no decisions to plague her. It would only be her, in the arms of the girl she loved.

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!