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 69th cycle. Now cycle 70!
GLEEKATHON FOURTH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE - It's October again, which means another year of Gleekathon is about to wrap up! At the end of the month it will have been four years since I've started doing my daily stories! As always, I will be celebrating this with a special cycle of stories to touch on my favorite stories I've done throughout the year. There will be two installments each on Thursdays, Saturdays, Mondays, and Wednesdays. The remaining days will feature, as they have in the last several months, new chapters of the latest story in my Doctor Who/Glee crossover series. As far as the anniversary stories go, it will be as I've done before, taking those past stories and either doing a prequel, sequel, POV swap, genre swap, alternate ending, or additional scenes.
This story is an ALTERNATE ENDING on "Siren Call" a Berry-St series story originally posted from November 9 to November 27 2012.
(This is a shift day, which means there will be two stories posted today!)
"No Place Like Home"
In Gen1!World: Gen1!Rachel, Jesse/Quinn, Santana, Brittany
Berry-St series extra
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)
The last time she had gone through this had been as traumatic as it ever could be, and she never wanted to have it be that way on the return trip. She didn't have all that much control over it, so when she'd felt herself falling asleep, the last of her strength had been dedicated to getting herself to the bed, so she wouldn't fall on the floor. She had succeeded, and now she was… transported.
She didn't know where she was or where she was going, only that she was being carried off on a rollicking wave, and she had no idea where she would stop. For a moment, she was completely unconscious, and then… she was hearing sounds, feeling the world around her all over again. She may have managed to secure a comfortable landing on the other side, but now she was returning to her real life, her real body, and this one was lying on the ground, or sitting on it from the feel of it. Her back was against something that felt a lot like high school lockers, and she was leaning against someone else.
"Quinn, Jesse, can you hear me?" a muddled voice asked, and then the rest of the world shot back into her. She gasped awake, at the same time he did, sitting next to her.
"What… Are we…" Jesse mumbled, blinking, rubbing at his face before turning to her. Whatever else was happening around them, they had no idea, nor did they care. "Quinn?" he asked. The others might have interpreted it as him being surprised, confused. To him, it was one word to ask a simple question: Are you the same one I was talking to a second ago.
"Jesse," she beamed; she was the same, and he was, too. He got hold of her face and kissed her gently.
"Okay, easy there, you might want to hold on to that oxygen right now," Rachel's voice broke in as the girl tapped both of their shoulders. They broke apart and looked at her. She gave them a smirk. This one said 'welcome home, love birds.' The three of them laughed, much to Santana's confusion, still crouched by their side.
"What happened to you two, did you bang your heads while trying to make out?" she asked, and they finally realized where they were as they spotted the small crowd around them.
"I don't know, I just got a little lightheaded…" Quinn started.
"Stood up too fast," Jesse added at the same time.
"We're fine… Santana… Really," Quinn promised.
"I'll get them to the nurse," Rachel piped in, to get the situation back under control. "I've got this," she nodded to Santana. "I'll check in with you later?" she offered her a smile. Jesse was already getting up, helping Quinn at the same time, which might have been somewhat rushed. Both the returnees' legs wobbled, and Rachel helped to steady them.
"Are you sure?" Santana asked, and Rachel knew that tone in her voice meant she might have bruised their relationship in sending her away. There was just no choice though, not in this case. She'd had some rough patches, if they could call it that, when it came to her fellow reality jumpers, but she owed them more than she would ever declare out loud, and she couldn't leave them on their own, not when this whole hell had finally come to an end.
"I'll call you as soon as I can, I promise," she looked Santana in the eye, hoping that in what little time they had been getting closer, they had gotten close enough that she would know this was the absolute truth. For now she guided the newly returned Jesse and Quinn into an empty room and shut the door. "So… what happened, I mean… You're back? It's really you?" she looked from one to the other.
"It's really us," Jesse nodded, and he smiled at Quinn, who smiled back at him.
"Hey, hey," Rachel snapped her fingers in their faces. "There'll be plenty of time for that later. It's over, right? You're here, and they'll be there, and everyone's where they're supposed to be?"
"I think so, I mean… we're all here, and that's it, so… it's over," Jesse shrugged.
"Then if it's over, that means we don't have to talk about it, ever again, do we?" Rachel went on.
"Well, I wasn't going on the news with this," Quinn frowned at her.
"You know what I mean. It's done, so we don't need to think about any of it like it was real. That's the kind of talk that gets you locked up in a mental hospital."
"Yeah, we know that," Jesse promised her.
"What was it with you and Santana before?" Quinn asked, and Rachel's head snapped toward her.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Well, that," Quinn nodded to her.
"Which is none of your business," Rachel crossed her arms before herself.
"Wow, okay… So I guess that answers that question."
"What question?" Rachel asked.
"The question as to whether you'd still talk to us like normal people when this was all over, and it looks like a no," Quinn told her, and Rachel could see a hint of disappointment that deflated her frown.
"Of course I'll still talk to you, that's ridiculous…" Quinn didn't look convinced. "Just because I prefer to keep some things to myself doesn't mean I'm a complete… Look, I know the three of us didn't get off on great terms…"
"Is that what you're calling it?" Quinn asked, and Rachel threw her a look.
"The point is, and I may or may not have said it to you earlier, but you can't go through something like what we went through and not become… I don't know, connected." Now it got her a smile. "Whatever happens now, love birds, I'm here for you. Got it." Quinn and Jesse shared a look before turning a smile to her.
"Got it," Jesse spoke for them both.
"Good. Now… Welcome home," Rachel tapped them both on the arm before letting out a breath and pulling them into a group embrace. The world they had all returned to would never be the same one they'd left. It had a lot of the old, but it also had the new, the changes they would never want undone.
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!