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!
"To the Stage We Go"
In Gen2!World: G1!Quinn/Jesse, G2!Sam, New Directions
Berry-St series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)
Bagging Sam Evans into the pale imitation of a Glee Club that was New Directions at the moment had been crucial, and Quinn knew it. Even if she could get everyone back into that choir room, they would only be eleven, with Matt gone, and that wouldn't be enough, they needed to be twelve, and Sam would make twelve. For now though, all she had to go on was a shaky recording of him singing in the locker room showers, and the fact that, if she was perfectly blunt, he would look very good on stage. That part she had kept to herself, the better not to give Jesse the wrong idea.
Anyone could sing in the shower, and that wouldn't mean they'd be up to joining a Glee Club though. Her father sang in the shower; the day he got up to sing and dance some show tune or anything they'd ever done, they'd all be shipped off to the nuthouse. She needed to know that Sam Evans' 'performance' was not just a fluke.
She was not as discreet in watching him as she might have tried to be, and one day he had seen her. She'd tried to make a covert exit, but it was too late. He had come up to her all charm and swagger, and she realized he was under the impression she was watching him because she liked him. She'd found it all too convenient to tell him that she was seeing someone, even if she couldn't tell him that there were two sides to that answer, one of them being that in absolute truth she was seeing Jesse, the other that she was supposed to be secretly with Rachel Berry.
It was a note of some comfort that, upon hearing that she wasn't available, Sam had turned back the charm and did not push any further. Still, he was curious as to why she was staring at him, so she had to make her pitch, right then and there. She told him how they were currently looking to form up a club which would in part involve their putting on a play.
"It might be a musical," Quinn went on, remembering her talk with Rachel not that long ago. "Kind of with a sci fi twist?" She didn't know that this was exactly what they might call this situation of theirs, but she could brush up the specifics later. For now, all that mattered was convincing the boy standing across from her. Apparently, she'd chosen the exact words, if only to hold his interest long enough to keep going.
"That sounds awesome, but… a musical…"
"Do you sing?" she asked.
"Well, yeah, but…" he smiled nervously.
"What about instruments, do you play any?"
"I have a guitar, acoustic," he nodded.
"What about dancing?"
"Sort of?" he assessed himself, frowning, and she laughed.
"We can work with that," she nodded. "Do you think you might be able to drop in and let us see what you can do?"
Even though he had no shot at all with her, Quinn was about halfway sure that the reason he'd come to them that first time was because she had asked him. He'd been uneasy about the whole thing at first, but then the thing she and Jesse had hoped for had happened. His presence had effectively lit a fire under the others, and they had actually started working together, to the point where Quinn had told Jesse confidently that they might be able to start bringing the others in before long.
They had continued to work together, and they were improving. But the only way they would properly move forward would be to, well, make a move. They had to declare themselves, to show that the Glee Club, or what small semblance of it, was alive and thriving, and then they could get Schuester back, and Rachel and the others. There was only one way of doing it: they had to perform, in front of everyone.
"The only thing I'm worried about is Sylvester. She actually pulled it off here, she stopped the club from happening, and she kept it that way for a year. The minute she hears about this, she's going to try and get in our way again," Quinn told Jesse as she trailed behind him and his mop bucket, late one afternoon. She'd been about to go to Figgins' office to make the request, but she'd stopped, worried all at once.
"Yeah, but that's what she did before, too," Jesse pointed out.
"And here she succeeded."
"But it can't be impossible, otherwise what chance would we have of getting home?" Jesse looked at her. She had never been as confident as the Quinn he'd known in the first world he'd been thrown into. She wasn't weak, but she was nervous. She'd gotten better; she still had room to grow. "Hey," he spoke, seeing how she kept staring at that door, twisting her fingers together. She looked at him. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone and put his hands on her shoulders, or hugged her, or kissed her, something to show her that he was there for her, but he couldn't do that, not here, not when they had covers to uphold. "You can do it," he simply told her. She smiled, thankful. "For now, just worry about Figgins."
"I'm not worried about Figgins," she shrugged, and he chuckled.
"Well, keep that in mind and you'll be fine. And I'll be right here."
"Right," she breathed, straightening herself up. "If you see Sylvester coming or anything, just drop your mop real loud to warn me?"
"I can do that," he agreed. "I'm not the most coordinated janitor, I won't even be acting out of character." He'd put one more smile on her face before she went in, and that made him smile back.
After she'd gone through the door, he had continued to wash the floor, being mindful not to go so fast, so that he could keep an eye on things and not have to get too far from the principal's office. Quinn had been in there, talking with Figgins, for four minutes, when Jesse let the mop fall loudly to the ground.
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!