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 44th cycle. Now cycle 45!

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** UPDATED WITH CYCLE 45 CHEAT SHEET ** Check it out to find out about shift days!

This is a shift day [see above]. There will be another upload this afternoon: A Dish Best Served Cold, chapter 8.

"Parted in Reality"
Jesse, Quinn, Jesse/Rachel
series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

Sometimes it would seem as though having to play a couple with one another was worse than the fact that they had been taken from their worlds and put into an alternate version of it. Quinn would walk around like she hated his guts most of the time, and Jesse only knew her about as much as she would let him, which wasn't all that much. But the people they were to impersonate, they were a couple, they were in love, from what they had experienced, interacting with them for some time before the Quinns were swapped and this whole mess had started. So they could imagine in their world, those two having to go about like they weren't together would be uncomfortable for completely different reasons. Now here, pretending to be them, Jesse and Quinn did their best, but they knocked heads plenty of times.

Only then the Rachels had been swapped back, and that had thrown everything upended. They had been stuck with this other Rachel, the brasher, harder one, and already this jeopardized their ability to get back to their own world just as she had. If it hadn't been for Jesse calling things for what they were, she would probably have walked out of their lives and they would have been stuck just the two of them and Brittany, trying to find their way home, and as much as they couldn't go about telling too many people, it did feel like it was better to have all four of them on this instead of losing people along the way.

But it wasn't just in dealing with this other Rachel that things had changed, and it took Quinn a few days to really see it. Jesse had been affected by this, and now she was starting to piece together why. He wasn't saying anything about it, but she hadn't been blind. Even as they were playing lovey lovers to keep up appearances, his eye had been wandering more and more to the brunette, their hands would clasp together when it was just the three of them, the four of them when Brittany was there…

And now she was gone, and it was as though his eyes still looked for her, hand still reached for hers, but found none…

One day, stopping by her locker before heading to the cafeteria, she could hear the faint sound of piano playing, off in the choir room. She frowned… she'd just seen Brad down the hall so it wasn't him. She moved up to the door, and there she saw it was him, Jesse. He was playing, but he wasn't really paying attention either. It sounded like… she couldn't place it, but if she had to put money on it she'd say it was something from Bon Jovi.

She sighed, silently walking into the room, shutting the door behind her. The other doors were already closed, and when he heard this one, he didn't stop, but she knew he had seen her. For a while she just stood at the other end of the piano, let him play on, waited to see if he'd stop at some point.

"Will Jesse take his girlfriend to lunch?" she asked after a few minutes, sort of to gauge where his head was at, if jokes would fly or crash.

"Which girlfriend?" he spoke eventually, then, "Which Jesse?" He stopped playing, turned his eyes up to her. She had never seen him so down, no matter how much he tried to keep a strong front.

"You know, I've always been able to tell the difference between you and the other Jesse, the one who belongs here. But right now, you really remind me of him, the way I knew him before I switched. He was always kind of distressed, because he was in one place and the girl he loved was in another. In that case, this girl had my face, too, so that was one thing, but… I look at you now and I see the distress."

"Is it so impossible for you that I miss Rachel?" he asked, some frustration coming in his voice as he stood up. "I know all you see when you look at me is the guy that lied to her and… pretended to like her for her birth mother, the woman who's raising your daughter now, right?" Quinn flinched, but she kept listening. "Here's something you might want to start thinking about. Just because something started one way, doesn't mean it's how it ended. I know… how it looked when it did end, but it's not… it wasn't…" She had never seen him at a loss for words, and it was almost unsettling. "I didn't want to…" He stopped, gathered himself back together. "You want the truth? As strange and problematic as this whole alternate reality leaping thing has been, I didn't mind it so much because it gave her and me a chance to start over. We were getting somewhere, and I was… happy. Except now she's gone, and all I've got left is a fake girlfriend who looks at me like I'm a bastard, and a girl who looks just like Rachel except she's not… not my Rachel, if she was ever… ever mine." Now he almost looked like he was about to cry, and Quinn took a few steps forward. He sat back down at the piano bench, and eventually she came to sit at his side, facing the other way.

"I'm sorry," she spoke honestly. She made an effort not to look him in the eye, affording him at least some privacy if he should break down and not want her to see. But he didn't break, if only by that much.

"I've missed her before… never so much as now."

Silence hung over them. All the fight in him had deflated, and she didn't know what to tell him. They were all still trying to get home, though at the moment they were still trying to make sure this Rachel would continue to help them. They had promised they would try and help in return by seeing if they could reunite her fathers, so they really needed to get on with that, but with this now…

They were interrupted when the door opened and there was Brad, returning. Jesse got up, so Quinn did as well. "Sorry, we were just heading to lunch," Jesse told him, turning to Quinn and offering his hand. The 'boyfriend Jesse' smile didn't look nearly so forced today, and Quinn reciprocated it, putting her hand in his. They walked past the man and went into the hall toward the cafeteria.

"Any ideas how we're going to get Rachel's dads back together?" she asked as they went along.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"It's alright. We'll think of something."

After that day, things had changed for them. They were still uncomfortable about playing the couple, as they weren't, and as they both knew where his heart really belonged, but the antagonism had fallen by the side. In the end maybe this would be for the best, taking away what could have been a distraction from the ultimate goal to get back home. Now more than ever, that was all they wanted.

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!