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 86th cycle. Now cycle 87!

IT'S THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE OF GLEEKATHON! - Five years! Five years! *insert flailing* Okay, not quite, but by the end of this cycle, it will have been five years of daily stories (sometimes twice a day! ... and for seven very frightening days a couple years back, three times a day!). It will also be the end of this crazy ride. I started thinking about ending gleekathon months ago, and I wanted to finish my ongoing series before that happened. It made it so I could finish out this fifth year, and it couldn't be any better that this cycle is actually ending on October 22nd 2014, which was the day it began, in 2009... Now here we go!

This story is an Element Change of Setting Roots, a Trinity series story originally posted on March 28th 2014.

"Future Now"
(Older) Quinn, Santana/Brittany, Spencer (OC), Winger (OC), Florence (OC)
Trinity series

Element change: Spencer calls in the day instead of night

The night Quinn had told him they were expecting a baby, his instincts had first been to wait until she'd gone to bed and then sneak out to call Winger and inquire on the status of their self-imposed exile, but then he would look at her, his future wife, and he couldn't bring himself to leave her, even if only for half an hour. This night was special, and he wanted to stay there with her, holding her, feeling her fall asleep before he fell asleep, too. So it wasn't until the next day that he went about making the call.

It might have seemed foolish to do this in broad daylight, but then maybe it was precisely why he needed to do it this way. If anything, he'd be much more expected to make this call at night, so this could be safer. The hard part would be to get the phone from its hiding place. He would bury it somewhere new whenever he had to return it to the ground after a call. This time, he needed to go and unearth the phone from under a park bench on the outskirts of town. If anyone asked why he'd come in late to work, he could just tell them he'd overslept, after hearing the good news. Quinn had assured him she wasn't superstitious and he could tell people. Truth be told, he might have been a tiny bit superstitious himself, but he could learn to move past it in this case.

He reached the bench in question, and like he'd done when he'd buried the phone there, he'd first sat down, as though it was all he planned to do here, and he got a good casual look around, ensuring no one would be there to see him. He was in no hurry, and only once he was absolutely sure did he stand and crouched, facing the bench but looking to all the world as though he was fixing his shoe. His back still pained him a great deal if he wasn't careful, but he didn't waste time. Soon he was unfolding, standing, and hiding the small pack inside his jacket.

Spencer had fixed the turned earth, then as he walked off from the bench, he pulled out the phone from its wrappings and got to making the call as he walked off to where he'd be burying the thing next. He called Winger's cell, knowing his friend's tech would ensure this was the safest way to call him undetected during the day.

"Hello?"

"Can you talk?" Spencer asked. There was a sudden and deliberate lack of sound there, coming from the man on the other end of the line, until Spencer guessed his brain had realigned.

"I'm afraid I'm not at the store today," Winger finally replied, though Spencer could hear just how nervous he'd gotten all of a sudden, which made him wonder if maybe…

"Are you with them now?" He wouldn't speak their names, but he knew the only thing that could make Winger so nervous about speaking to him now was if he had Santana and Brittany within earshot.

"Looks that way, yeah," Winger answered, and before he could speak again, he heard it – a baby crying. "Oh, no, no, don't cry, I'm not…" Spencer could practically see him, holding the child, terrified he might be doing it wrong, that he might drop him or her… That was Santana and Brittany's child, he knew, and now he felt guilty that he was able to do something so simple as hear its cries, when Quinn couldn't. "I promised your aunt I could do this, so please stop crying, okay?" he begged, and when the baby quieted down, the young man on the other end of the line had laughed to himself. "I did it… I… Oh." He'd just remembered who was on the phone with him. "Sorry, that was…"

"Don't worry about it. Listen, I need to know if anything's changed, if we're… If we're safe."

"Well, I would need to check the… the inventory and the… No, hey, not the glasses, come on…"

"What are you doing?" Spencer heard a woman ask in the background, laughing. Brittany…

"She got my glasses, I can't…" Winger told her.

"Flo, give Uncle Simon his glasses back," Brittany's voice was nearer, sweet as she addressed what Spencer now knew was a baby girl.

"Yeah, I think she's too young to understand that," Winger was saying.

"I know," Brittany replied. "Who's on the phone?"

"No one, client," Winger was quick to reply. "Here, can you just… I'll pick her up again when I'm done here, I promise, okay…" The baby, whose name had to be Flo, Florence, protested for a moment at the hand off, but then Spencer heard the distinct sound of a door, and the ambient noises now painted the picture that he'd gone to stand outside. "Sorry about that," he breathed out.

"It's alright," Spencer told him. Quinn would have given anything for all that information, and I can't tell her any of it. "Just answer the question."

"Sure, I mean… You could come back, you could have never left, and it would have been the same. You might be fine, or you might be in trouble, and there'd be no way of knowing, and I know that's not what you wanted. So, if I'm to answer within the parameters of your definition of safety, then… No, not yet. I'm sorry. I wish I could tell you something else, but… Oh, there's so much to tell you about everything else. You heard how I had the…"

"Let's just leave it at that, okay?" Spencer cut him off; he didn't need to know more on that subject than he already did.

"Sure, but… Are you two okay?" Winger asked. He wished he could tell him, to share the good news he'd received the night before, but it wouldn't have been fair to put one more secret on him when he didn't have to.

"As okay as we can be. I'll be in touch. Thank you." And he hung up.

He would have wanted so much to be able to give Quinn some news of his own, but he hadn't gotten his hopes too high. If the danger still existed for them out there, the last thing he wanted was to bring her or their child anywhere near it. So the phone was put back in the ground and that was the end of it for the day.

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!