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 'Prequel or SEQUEL' for Waking World, a Berry-St series story originally posted on July 7th 2014.

"Jumpers"
Quinn/Jesse
Berry-St series

They'd been four months in this version of Lima, their third jump. On the one hand, being that they had done this a couple of times already, it wasn't so much about being thrown off the deep end anymore. They knew the first steps to follow right after a jump. Step one: find each other. Step two: figure out what it was that made this world different. Step three: locate any other people who might have been pulled along for the ride. Step four: work with them and any other allies that might come along in order to fix the problem at hand. It was easy enough, right up until step four, and then all bets were off.

Except this jump had involved a bit of an added curveball: here, she had a baby. In every other world but her own, there had been this part of her counterparts' lives, they'd all had this child, but then by the time she showed up, the baby was off with its adoptive parents, and she never saw it. This time around, she had the little girl right there, looking at her, depending on her… It had thrown them off their game, when they had to adjust and figure out how to fit little Beth into their attempts to return home. With time, they had gotten better, of course, and as hard as they were working to get home, there was something about being there, the three of them, Quinn and Jesse and the baby. They were playing family, with a baby that wasn't truly theirs to keep.

They found this out the hard way when they did manage to jump out of this world… without the little girl. It had been hard on them both, but on Quinn most of all. She'd try to hide it, but Jesse could see right through her. And to make matters worse, they weren't out of the woods just yet: they'd landed in another new world, their fourth. Despite their mental state at this jump, it had been their best one. One month, and they were jumping again, a fifth time, still not homebound.

This one had not been so clean. In all, it had been nearly a year, short of a few days, before they were thrown onward. That this time had coincided with Quinn's graduation from McKinley, hers and many others', which left them potentially scattered to the winds before they could resolve their problem. By the last few weeks, as much as they continued to work toward their 'fix,' it had been so long that they felt as though they'd settled down. They had spent more time here than they'd spent in this 'real world' they were trying to get back to.

It had been over two years since they'd started this, and it had always been the goal: get home. When a jump ended, whoever Jesse and Quinn had been impersonating got to return to the lives the experienced jumpers had borrowed. Anyone else who'd been pulled along, on either end, had themselves a clean swap back. No one else tagged along with Jesse and Quinn, no one else knew what they'd been through over all these jumps.

Their fifth jump had turned into a sixth, a seventh, eighth, ninth… Their fourteenth jump marked seven years away from 'home.'

It had taken them a week to find each other, longer than ever before, so long that they'd worried on either end that perhaps the other had been sent back without them. When they'd finally tracked each other down, on opposite ends of the country, Jesse had gotten on the first plane out. Quinn waited for him at the airport, knowing the moment she saw him she would burst into tears. He took off running for her as soon as he'd cleared the gate, scooped her up into his arms.

"You scared me to death," he breathed.

"You do that to me again, I'm stringing you to my wrist next time," she replied.

She took him back to her apartment. They had quickly learned that keeping a hold of Jesse would be tricky. One way or another, this thing they had to do would center around Lima, where Quinn was. Jesse tended to be an outsider. Save for their own world, where he had been raised in Lima, gone to school there, all the others had gone through Akron, through Carmel High and Vocal Adrenaline. It wasn't the first time he had found himself living out of the city, out of state, but this was the furthest they'd ever been.

"Here, eat," she put the plate before him, after reheating the leftovers.

"You read my mind. Can't do plane food," he sat, grabbing the fork and taking a bite.

She knew he was watching her while he ate, reading her, but she couldn't make herself hide it away. He really had scared her. They loved each other, through and through. They'd been through things together that no one else would understand. After seven years, 'home' wasn't the Lima of their youth. Home was each other. They had lost all expectations of ever returning to this other, physical home after they'd entered double digit jumps.

Resigning themselves to their situation didn't mean ignoring what it all meant for their lives in the long run. They could never know for certain how long they would be anywhere, before they ended up jumping again. They could never settle down. One day, two jumps ago, they had put on their finest, met out at lakeside, exchanged some words… It was the nearest thing to a wedding they could hope for. There were no rings for them to carry over from jump to jump, but they didn't need rings if they had each other. This was an easy concession; others were not.

Being sent on one jump after the next, knowing they'd never get to stay there, knowing they'd never get to stay anywhere, it meant all they could ever take with them was their own mind, their memories. The bodies were not their own, only borrowed until such a time as they moved onward, which meant they could leave nothing to chance, taking what precaution they could for Quinn never to become pregnant. Those precautions were like the rings, they could deal. The thing that truly sat heavy on their hearts was the knowledge that, if they really were stuck this way for the rest of their lives, then they could never have children. They couldn't conceive them, or adopt them, because come jump time… they would be gone.

The closest thing they could hope for was getting to see Beth again. She did appear from time to time, proving that there wasn't only one reality in which Quinn Fabray had decided to keep her child and raise her. At times she had different names, but it was always her, they could tell. They saw her grow up, in short bursts, and maybe they could never tell her the truth, but having her nearby was enough; it had to be. The hardest part was always to know that, no matter what they did, there would come a day where they would jump again, and she might not be on the other side. Jesse knew Quinn hoped, when they jumped, that she would find her daughter again when she opened her eyes once more. This would be their third jump in a row not seeing her.

"You're going back, aren't you?" she asked him, meeting his eye again. With experience, they'd known that sometimes their placement was not coincidental, that it had to be factored in. He put the fork down, moved his chair nearer to hers.

"Booked the return flight a week from today, so we have that long to figure what we're dealing with together. But we'll be in touch, you know that," he took her hands.

"I know," she promised, breathing out.

If their biggest regret was their inability to build a family of their own, their biggest fear was what would happen when one of them died. It would happen sooner or later, wouldn't it? They weren't immortal, they were aging with those they inhabited, time kept moving… If they were never able to settle, to stop jumping, then they would get older, and older, and one day… One day, one of them would be dead, leaving the other to carry on alone. Jesse had nightmares about that, as much as she did, and some nights they didn't sleep at all, for fear of those nightmares.

"And we have a week," he added, giving her a smile. "Let's not waste it." She smiled back. They weren't going to think about nightmares today, or what they did or didn't have. It wasn't time for that, not when they were home with each other.

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!