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 a 'Character swap' for Rallying, a Berry-St series story originally posted on June 21st 2014.

"What If We Were"
Brittany, New Directions, Will
Berry-St series

Character swap: Brittany for Puck

She'd heard them talking, Quinn, and that janitor guy. She didn't know what they were going on exactly, but they were talking about Glee Club, so she'd listened. Being in that room with the others had been some of her best times in the last few weeks, and she knew some of the others, Santana included, felt the same way she did. But according to Quinn and Jesse, they weren't doing well. They were on the verge of falling apart. If that happened, then what? No more Glee Club? No, she didn't want that, she wanted to keep singing and dancing with them.

"Someone needs to do something," Quinn had said.

If had been these words, particularly that she'd said 'someone,' not just I, or we, which had settled it for Brittany. What if this someone was her? Half of them had been her friends already, the other half didn't really dislike her, so they just might listen to her, right? If she could convince them, then they could keep their club, keep singing, keep dancing…

She'd spent a day drawing up possible ways of getting it done. Her teachers must have thought her suddenly hard at work, with the way she kept her nose buried in her notebook from start to finish in each class. If they had bothered to take a look at what she was scribbling though, they would know better. Her master plan to unite the Glee Club was slow coming, but once she'd made up her mind, she wasn't giving up. The clincher had come in the shape of an ally, a friend with technical capacities far outweighing her own. Now all she had to do was to get the pieces together.

It took three days for her to isolate each one of them in turn and convince them to do this one thing for her. As always, some were easier to convince than others, but Brittany felt confident enough that she didn't shy away on account of this difficulty. She knew she was hard to say no to if she tried hard enough, so she tried, and tried, and one by one the members of their beleaguered choir stopped a moment and they followed her into the auditorium.

One by one they'd stood on that stage, and they'd let her film them as they sang, the same song, each of them. She told them it was for her video diary, that she wanted to have memories that she couldn't forget. At each performance that she got, she crossed one name off the list in her notebook, until the only one that remained was her own, and she took her own turn up on that stage.

The day they all went into the choir room again after that, she waited until everyone was there, all twelve of them and Schuester, too, and then she raised her hand.

"Brittany?" Will asked, and without any further prompt, she'd stood and gone to stand in front of them all. She breathed, smiled.

"I have something to say," she stated before turning to Will. "Don't start it yet, okay?" she handed him a DVD case. He frowned, unsure, but still he went to bring the projector into the room, pull down the screen, while Brittany spoke to the others. "I like being in Glee Club," she told them. "I like coming here and being with all of you. You're my friends, and when your friends are in trouble, you're supposed to help them, right?"

"Who said we were in trouble?" Puck frowned.

"She did," Brittany pointed to Quinn, who hesitated, finding the others had turned to look at her. "But she's right," Brittany brought them back on topic. "We keep fighting, and I know it's because of bad things that happened before, but… I know you all like being in here, same as I do, even if you won't say it. I know, and I can prove it. We all belong in here, look," she turned to Will, giving him a nod which he took to mean he was meant to hit play.

She had watched it several times herself already. Her techy ally had really outdone herself. She had taken all the voices, mixed them to sound as though they were all singing together, and that was what Brittany had asked her to do in the first place, but then she hadn't expected the video aspect of it. Somehow she had taken their individual images, as they'd each stood in front of the camera, on the auditorium stage, and she'd stuck them side by side, so that they now looked to be singing together, in a row… like one united show choir.

If she'd been amazed, the others were just floored. They stared at that screen, and she couldn't say what they were thinking, but they weren't looking away, so it had to be a good thing. When the song was over, and the screen went to black, Brittany stood and went to face them again.

"Surprise, I don't have a video diary," she declared with something almost like a flourish. "But we can make this work, can't we? You saw it. If there's things we need to talk about, we'll talk about them. I don't want to lose this, and you shouldn't either. I want to fight for my club, don't you?"

There were a few very tense seconds when no one spoke, and Brittany wondered if they didn't feel the way she did after all. Maybe she'd gotten it wrong.

Then Puck got up. She looked at him, they all did, like they thought he would walk out. But instead he walked across the rows of chairs, and he stopped in front of Finn. The other boy looked at him, and when Puck extended his hand to him, Finn stood, too. He looked at him, stared at him, and finally, tentatively, he clasped the offered hand. Brittany smiled, especially as, in light of this one gesture, the others had started to give signs of being on board, about wanting to make this show choir work. Maybe they weren't in as much trouble as Quinn and the janitor had believed.

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!