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 37th cycle. Now cycle 38!

PRE-CHRISTMAS NON-CHRISTMAS: It's already my third holiday season of Gleekathon, woo! So happy about that :D Anyhoo, just to explain what I'm doing for it this year: How it goes is I always have a set of stories with Christmas-y titles but non-Christmas-y plots, so to give an air of the season but not too much ;) First year was '12 Days of Christmas', last year was 'Reindeer'. This year's theme is "Christmas Movies" :) It'll run from December 8th to 19th, after which I have a slightly bigger undertaking to take us to Christmas Eve (stay tuned and find out, ha! ;)). So here we go!

"While You Were Sleeping"
Sam/Rachel, Nell (OC)
Sam & Nell series, continuing from "Lullaby Girls"

When they'd arrived home, everyone else had gone to change out of their clothes, start getting ready for bed, except for Sam. He was going to go to his room, which was also Nell's, to check in on her, but then he heard the television in the living room. He looked over for a second, and he spotted them. He smiled, taking off his shoes before silently padding into the darkened room. They were both asleep, Rachel keeping Nell safe in her arms. The image sort of caught him off guard… it was serene and perfect and he wouldn't have dreamed of disturbing it but he had to. He smiled, carefully extracting his daughter from his girlfriend's arms, careful not to wake either of them as he took Nell to her crib. He settled her down, made sure she was alright before returning to the living room. Rachel had resettled in her sleep, now that she wasn't holding on to anything. She was curled up on her side, head bowed down into the curve as well. Sam got down on his knees to be at eye level with her. He could have just let her sleep there, but he knew how uncomfortable the couch could get if you managed to make it through a night sleeping on it.

Looking at her though, he wasn't sure why, he started thinking about the first time he'd seen her. He didn't remember this at first, but she'd probably been one of the first people he'd encountered on his first day at McKinley High. He had to go by the principal's office, first thing in the morning. When he got there the secretary told him to sit and wait for his turn. The walls looking into the man's office were clear glass, and he probably wouldn't have looked if it wasn't for what was going down on the other side of that window wall. The man he assumed was the principal was sitting behind his desk, while across from him, back turned to Sam, a girl with long dark hair appeared to be giving a very impassioned speech or something. The man didn't look too impressed, like he'd seen this before.

Sam would try not to look, at times averting his eyes, but it was impossible not to look back eventually. Still when the girl turned to leave he hadn't actually managed to see her face. After that his day had gone off normal enough, and really the one thing that had been memorable had been the encounter with the shouting girl. It wasn't until he was taken in to meet the Glee Club and sat on a back row looking down that he discovered the girl was in fact Rachel Berry.

After that, as the weeks had started going by, he wasn't sure what to expect from her, and he wasn't even thinking about her the way he did now, not yet, but he wasn't unaware of her by any means. After they'd started getting closer, becoming friends at first, all those little pieces of memories that were running through his head would begin to resurface, and it was like getting to know her all over again. And for all the crazy that came hand in hand with being part of her world, there was the rest. There was this girl, the one who he'd come to trust with the person he cared the most for in the entire world, his baby girl Nell. She was so much more, he felt, than sometimes even she realized. Now that they'd been brought together like this, he couldn't see his life without her, just like he couldn't imagine her not being in Nell's life.

That line of thought wasn't without its concerns. He knew she wasn't like Summer, that she'd be there for Nell, but then she didn't have any sort of obligation toward her. She could just walk away. He didn't think she would, or at least she didn't look like it was her intention. She was growing attached to Nell, day by day, he could see it. She didn't look spooked by the idea of his having a daughter, so he wasn't going to treat her like she should have been. Except what if things changed? What if they changed, and…

No, he wasn't going to go down that road, not now, not any time soon. They were dating, and they were happy, things were working out and absolutely normal and just everything he could have hoped for. Making himself worry about that kind of thing wouldn't bring anything he needed in his life, or Nell's, or Rachel's. So now he could try and wake her up from her rest on the couch.

"Rachel…" he started by whispering, slipping his hand in hers. She stirred, but resettled with a smile, and he chuckled quietly. "Are you dreaming about me now?" he joked, not expecting a response.

"Mm mm, uh uh," her voice mumbled and he looked to see she was indeed waking up, just barely.

"Good dreams? Bad dreams?" He paused, smirked. "Sexy dreams?" She snorted.

"Like I'd tell y…" Her eyes opened all at once, like she'd realized something, and she startled, looking at herself, searching, and he figured out why. "It's okay, it's okay, I put Nell in her crib," he revealed, reaching to make her settle. She relaxed at his words, moving to sit up, and he could tell she had gotten a bit of a taste of the couch's generosity for giving aches. Once there was space for it, he sat at her side.

"Yeah, sorry, I should have warned about the couch…"

"Don't worry about it, I've seen worse," she just shook her head, reached to check on her hair. "How was it tonight? Was it fun?"

"Well apparently that whole thing where people are all over you when you have a baby is also true when you don't have the baby with you. Everyone was asking where Nell was."

"Popular girl," Rachel smiled.

"Yeah," he laughed. "Other than that it was just long, kind of dull, and all I wanted was to be here with you and Nell," he admitted, which only made her keep smiling.

"Well we had a great time too, just us girls," she nodded. "I introduced her to Barbra. You know it's never too early with these things."

"Yes, absolutely," he agreed. There was a moment of silence, and he knew when they'd start talking again it'd be to say they should get going, so he could drive her home. It could wait a few more seconds though, time for looking at her a little longer…

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!