Spoilers: Up to BIOTA for Glee. But it's a bit AU. Episode 1x01 of NewWho.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em, not making money off 'em.
Author Notes: For the purposes of this fic, Blaine has never been out. Of the closet. He has of course been out of doors.
Rachel looked around her spacious, new, New York apartment. Luckily for her, Kurt had forgiven her for stealing his junior year crush shortly after he himself had found love, and was now a relatively well-known interior designer.
Consequently, pretty much everything about the place reeked of Kurt Hummel.
When he she had mentioned over that phone that she and Blaine would be buying an apartment together as a wedding gift to themselves, he had turned up on her doorstep with reams of paper and an impressive selection of pencils, and the plans for the apartment had begun.
Rachel had, of course, insisted upon there being at least one gold star in every room. After a battle royale - "gold just does not go with Dior grey and winter burgundy!" – he had managed to convince her that not every star had to be gold.
As a result, there were stars engraved in the mahogany kitchen dresser that werecovered in gold leaf, but the stars on the shower doors were simply frosted into the glass, and the stars on the black glass television cover were made with tiny little diamante studs, each one painstakingly stuck on by Kurt and what Rachel termed his "grown up's Bedazzler".
She had never told Kurt, or indeed anyone, the real reason why she loved stars (especially gold ones) so much.
For Rachel Berry came from the Voga, an asteroid that had been caught in Jupiter's orbit long ago. Technically it was a moon, but to Rachel, it was her home planet. Home to universe's greatest mass of gold, the entire place had glimmered whenever the sun's rays had fallen upon it.
Everything had been built from the heavy metal, from buildings to vehicles to furniture. Of course, it had had to be alloyed with other things for strength to build such things, but the primary metal had always been gold.
Then, when she was just six years old, the cybermen had arrived, tearing down all the beauty and the wonder, taking the people and enslaving them in their hideous grey bodies.
So her mother had fled the planet, bartering passage on one of the last ships to leave the docks. But their ship had been hit by a cyber's laser, sending it careering off course. They had crashed landed upon Sol 3, known to its inhabitants as 'Earth'.
All but Rachel had been killed.
She, tough then as she was now, had crawled out of the wreckage and knocked at the first door she had seen. It had been made of a strange substance, and had echoed oddly under her knuckles. There was no familiar metallic clang when she struck its flat surface.
A man had answered the door. He had had a kind face, so she told him what had happened, asking for help, for shelter from this strange world upon which she had landed. He had then called down his partner, and together, the three of them had gone back to the wreck of the ship.
The two men had realised that Rachel wasn't mad; she had been speaking the truth. They had also realised that she just might be the answer to their prayers.
The men told Rachel that they had been trying to adopt a child for years, but that so few agencies would even consider them because of their gender that they had never been chosen to receive a child. If she was happy with the suggestion, she could live with them, and they would raise her as their own.
And so they had. Hiram and Leroy had moved so another part of Ohio, to a town called Lima, and there they had raised their beloved little daughter, Rachel.
She loved her dads, she really did. But every night, she had gazed out of the window up at the heavens, and wondered which of the twinkled little lights was her own beloved Voga.
Her fathers had understood, knowing what it was like to dream of a world that you hardly dared believe could exist, because it seemed to wonderful to be real.
But for Rachel, it had been real. And so she surrounded herself with the gold stars that reminded her of her first home.
It had been during her junior year at McKinley High that she had met Blaine Anderson, the lead singer of another Glee club. They had had a slightly unfortunate start – Rachel's best friend Kurt had been infatuated with him, bringing him to Rachel's house party, and she had then proceeded to spend the entire evening glued to his lips. But after Kurt's feeling of betrayal had been assuaged, Rachel and Blaine had had a true Romeo and Juliet romance (without the depressing deaths at the end).
After Rachel's first across-the-barricades romance with Jesse St James, New Directions had known better than to try to dissuade her for long, and in the end, Blaine had moved to McKinley to be with her more often. Their duet had been one of the three songs that had won them Nationals, getting them both noticed by a Broadway producer who had been looking for fresh young talent to star in his newest show.
The parts had been small, part of a modern play where the narration rotated among the cast throughout the piece – they had a single solo line each in the entire production – but it had been a foot in the door.
And now here she was: about to get married to the love of her life, the gentlest, most respectful (if often inappropriate) man she had ever known. A man who shared her talent, a man who loved her in spite of the fact that he knew her career would always come first. . A man she didn't have to go on tip toe to kiss. A man who was happy to blend into the background and let her shine.
Life could not get any better.
Or so she thought. She never could have foreseen the lies, Blaine's line of secret lovers, the angry separation, the bitter divorce, or the soaring career that would result from her beautifully written songs of lost love and heartbreak.
Right now, she dreamed of a lifetime spent with the man of her dreams in her star-studded New York home.
Three and half thousand miles away, in a small flat in north London, a man in a leather jacket picked up a magazine. A man even more unusual than Rachel herself, and rather more perceptive.
He briefly studied a picture of Rachel and Blaine at their engagement party, pointing it out to his blonde companion in a mocking tone.
"It'll never work. He's gay, and she's an alien."
This is what happens when I see an old gif on Tumblr and it won't stop niggling at me.