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 77th cycle. Now cycle 78!

"Step Eighty, Fold Together"
Kurt/Jude (OC), Brittany/Santana, Harry (OC)
Paper Heart series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

Back when they had first found this place, some of them had had their doubts. It was not that the building didn't look good, if anything, it looked too good, or, more to the point, it looked too expensive. They had to remind themselves that, with the four of them splitting the rent and other costs among themselves, they could actually afford something better. And then once they'd seen the inside, they had been that much more sold on it. In a matter of days, it had become official: they had found their New York home.

Counting down the days until the move had been stressful on a level only they could reach, and then one day they had gone, Kurt and Jude first, to make sure things were good to go, and then Brittany and Santana, with Harry in tow, had joined them and they had all settled into the new apartment.

After all this time of Santana, and then Jude, being on the outside of their family situation, and Kurt and Brittany having to share their families' homes, they were now officially and for the first time cohabitating. There would be no more time splitting, no more visiting their boyfriends and girlfriends, and Harry would have all four of his parents under one roof.

The apartment had an upstairs and downstairs, with Brittany and Santana taking one upstairs bedroom, Harry taking the other, while Kurt and Jude had the downstairs bedroom. There were two bathrooms, one on each floor, and from upstairs they had a balcony, with a view out on the city that would become their favorite place to gather, weather permitting.

It had taken time for all of them to get used to their new living arrangements. The two couples had never been so close for so long, and it was not nearly as easy to change this as they'd thought, but with time they had found the rhythm they'd been looking to get. Then there was Harry, who was not used to having his own room. He'd always had Brittany there, or Kurt, and without either of them within sight if ever he woke up, Brittany and Santana were often visited by the small boy in the middle of the night. Even after weeks of living there, he still did it, if less than he'd done in the beginning.

But they were in New York, and if the relocation from Ohio was suffering its growing pains, the fact that this was happening in the city some of them had been dreaming of for years did help, more than they could possibly say. They had their moments where they missed home, and their families, but what a phone call couldn't fix, the comfort of a friend or lover went a long way to repair, just as the city could, too. Brittany had been 'discovering' new things every day and she could not wait to tell Santana or Kurt or Jude about it.

They still had some time before real life came back for them as far as school, which was a good thing, because one of the first things they'd had to do was look for jobs, making sure they could not only pay for this great new home of theirs, but also provide for themselves and for Harry. Brittany was waitressing; Santana was a sales clerk in a department store, just across the street from the bookstore where Jude worked. As for Kurt, he'd gotten a job as an usher at a theater, which at times could translate into discounts on tickets. And even though the production at his theater were not exactly anything to boast about, it had become something of a guilty pleasure among the four of them to go and see just how bad it could get. They would go time and again, to the same shows, and they would wait for those moments they knew were coming.

This had only become possible once they had gotten to know their neighbor, Mrs. Smith, and deemed that they could leave Harry with her in complete trust. The old widow was not the only one they could have chosen, of course. They had been surprised at how welcoming their other neighbors had been. They didn't know what they had been expecting all this time, but this had not been it. Everything had honestly been exceeding their expectations, which only served to bring about the belief that at some point, sooner rather than later, everything was going to go horribly wrong.

When they weren't looking for their inevitable doom, what remained was the good life they had built for themselves. They had been growing as a family in so many parts, before coming to New York, and now that they were here, it felt as though things were finally righting themselves. They were one whole family, and it didn't matter anymore how they had gotten there, or how fast. That wasn't exactly it, of course it mattered, but only in that it was their past, the ground they built so that now they could stand and look forward.

Sitting on the balcony, looking out, the four of them didn't have to speak so many words to know how they were in as good a place as they could have hoped for. They had found love, lifelong friends, and the boy that now slept in Santana's arms was the piece that had brought them all together, the sun around which the entire world orbited. Kurt looked at him, the way Brittany did, too, their son first of all, and they knew that as far as they were concerned, he had not been an accident, not in that way. Having him had been the thing that had gotten them where they were today, and a life without those changes, without him, would have been a poor and sad one.

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!