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 52nd cycle. Now cycle 53!

THIRD ANNIVERSARY CYCLE: It's late October again, and within this cycle I will be completing my third year of daily gleekathon stories and commencing a fourth! As in previous years, this means special things happening. I've selected my favorite stories from throughout the year, and I'll be treating them to something special. In previous years this included Prequel, Sequel, and POV Swap, and then Additional Scenes and Alternate Endings. This year I'm adding two new treatments: Genre Swap (I think that's pretty straightforward) and Element Change (I change one thing in the story, see how it affects the rest). Note that in both these cases and some of the others, there may excerpts directly transferred from the story it references. Also, since this year saw the addition of 'shift days', and since I suck at picking, I have selected 42 stories, to be treated two per day! So here we go!

This story is an Alternate Ending to Making of a Trinity, a Trinity series story, originally posted on November 6 2011.

This is a double shift day. There will be one more upload today: Not Alone.

"Like It Never Happened"
(Older) Quinn, Brittany/Santana
Trinity series extra
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

Santana wasn't working at the bar, the night after Quinn's surprise visit, so after she'd picked up Brittany from work, they'd decided to treat themselves to dinner and a movie. It was a good and cozy evening, and they had a pretty good idea where it was going to end, back at home. Brittany would get frustrated when something in movies didn't make sense to her, and she would get very vocal about it, which was surprisingly entertaining to her girlfriend. Santana would humor her as they went, nodding along, saying 'yes, you're right,' or 'no they really shouldn't do that.' If she got too deep into it though, Santana would pull her out by bringing up a part she knew Brittany would have liked, and then she'd be smiling and laughing. And by the time they got to their door, she was back in her smiles phase, which was just as well, or they'd never make it through the night.

"You want to watch a movie?" Brittany asked as they took off their shoes.

"We just got done with watching one," Santana pointed out.

"But I have leftover popcorn and candy," the blonde pointed right back. "Plus, in the theater, you won't let me do… stuff," she turned her eyes innocently, and Santana felt shivers. It wasn't like they didn't let the mood take them from time to time, but Brittany could get carried away sometimes, and Santana would have to stop her, as much as she hated to do it.

"Comedy? Drama?" she asked, turning to the DVD shelves.

"Action… gets me kind of…"

"Yeah I know how it gets you," Santana picked out an action movie with a smirk.

X

Her problem wasn't ended with a few bandages applied by shaky hands. Quinn had felt faint from blood loss the whole time, but she couldn't stop, had to finish what she'd started and get out before her old friends came home. She had cleaned up the wound as best she could, before she had moved on to bandages. It would take a lot, and it did occur to her that maybe Brittany and Santana would wonder what had happened, but most of the time people didn't realize they were running out of these things until they actually checked, so with any luck they would write it off as just that.

She would need stitches, something… Either way, she knew she was looking at a pronounced scar. It made her feel like crying, screaming, but she had to hold it in. She had taken a look around the bathroom, finding the mess she had left and now had to clean. Holding her bandaged arm to herself to protect it, she had started on the clean-up. Her head was still spinning, hands still shaking, but she had gotten it done. Picking up her case and everything else she had come with, she had backed out of the bathroom, taking a look. There was no trace that she had ever been there. After retracing her steps out the door, making sure she had not dripped blood along the way, she had shut the door and locked it again. Standing there, she had let out a breath.

Part of her wanted to stay. Part of her wanted them to find her. But she couldn't.

She had barely made it through the door to the staircase when she heard the elevator bell ding. She stayed close to the wall as she looked through the small window. As she'd thought, there were her friends, returning from their evening out together, smiling, happy… She couldn't stay, she had to go. So she did.

She made her way down the stairs and out of the building. She had started going through her jobs now with a few spots chosen in case she needed to stash things temporarily, and now she was glad she did. Once she would have the case and the 'evidence' she had taken with her, she really needed to get herself stitched up. She could see the bandages were just barely doing the job, already soaked through. She didn't have anyone to go to, so she'd just have to hope whoever she found would be willing to either hold their tongue out of the kindness of their hearts, or with some monetary incentive. If she just walked through the ER doors like this they would call the cops.

Once she'd found her guy – it would cost her two thousand dollars – she sat there and he started stitching. Her mind was already elsewhere, back in that bathroom.

She couldn't go back, to any of them. She had to disappear. For the most part, she had already done that. The only people she saw in the last few years, people who knew her, had only known her for a little while, and even then they didn't really know her. She didn't let them. She gave a fake name, most of the time. What was the point otherwise, it wasn't like she intended to let them get close enough to know her, to possibly discover what she did. There was her family, but really they only spoke, briefly, occasionally. Her friends from school were a thing of the past.

But then she'd seen Brittany on that street the morning before, and it had felt like she'd been walking with black and white vision for all this time, and seeing her had let the colors back in. Seeing Santana had done the same. It had felt good, for an evening's time, but who was she fooling? She had chosen this life, and she couldn't let sentiments derail her.

Her arm was fixed, though it still hurt. Now she would retrieve what she'd hidden away, clean up, pack her bags, and leave New York. Her job was done, and that was the end of it.

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!