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 62nd cycle. Now cycle 63!

"Saving Samaritan"
Quinn, Brittany, Santana, Claudia (OC)
Trinity series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

Some years ago – New York City

She'd had to run out to the post office to pick up a package. They were all just back from a job, and they would deny it every time, but Brittany and Santana tended to keep to home on those first days being back home. Maybe they were lying low, just in case, or it was easier that way to slowly let their Trinity personas seep back out of them. Quinn was the opposite, most times. She needed to get back into her life, whatever it was. So when she'd seen the notice waiting for her, she'd jumped on the chance. With the package tucked under her arm, she'd left the post office, deciding to get them all something from the bakery on the way home.

She was looking at the light across the street; that was how she'd spotted the girl. There was something in her eyes like she wasn't all there, maybe too preoccupied to think straight. Something must have happened with her, to leave her so disturbed. That might have been all there was to it, only Quinn had been watching her, and so when she'd started walking, bound for incoming traffic, there was no chance she'd miss it.

Quinn had reacted on instinct. She ran for her, seeing the car too close to swerve away, and she got hold of the girl just in time to pull her to safety. The girl had startled, and for a moment she was trying to wrench herself free.

"What were you doing, you could have gotten yourself killed!" Quinn told her, and finally the girl looked around, realizing what could have happened.

"Oh… I didn't think I was… I wasn't going to…" she shook her head before looking back at the stranger. "Thank you," she breathed.

"Come with me," Quinn reached to guide her back up the street.

"No, I'll be fine. I'm so embarrassed, I…"

"I'm just taking you to that coffee shop there, give you a chance to sit, until your hands stop shaking," Quinn pointed out, and the woman looked down.

"Right, okay."

They'd gone and sat at the shop, and Quinn had asked for water. For a while the short blonde would sit there, looking at her trembling hands in silence. "I'm Quinn," she introduced herself, to break the tension.

"Claudia," the woman breathed. "I wasn't trying to kill myself."

"I know," Quinn promised.

"No, really. It's just been a… complicated day."

"Do you want to talk about it?" Claudia looked at her, this stranger who had already pulled her from potential danger. "I'm with you as much as you need it," she told her.

"There was a break in, at my house. Something was taken, something of value, personal to me…"

"I'm sorry. Does the police have any leads?"

"I know who has it. I have no proof, but I know it's them," Claudia frowned, looking at her glass. Quinn had gotten that first twinge right there, this feeling like this could turn into something more than a rescue.

"What did they take?"

The bakery had been forgotten. When she was almost home, she'd put in a call, telling Santana that, whatever they'd been getting up to in her absence, she was on her way and they had to be ready to talk when she arrived. There she told them about the woman and her grandfather's stolen marble elephants. She'd had the last one, with the other four in the set already acquired by a collector years ago. She had refused to sell him the last one, and so he had taken it by force.

"I want to help her."

"You said so yourself, no jobs where we live, and I tend to agree," Santana told her.

"She's one person, one regular girl, and this thing shouldn't have happened to her. You should have seen her today, she almost died because of it. The job is not in New York, only her. I can go in by myself…"

"We're a team," Brittany cut her off, and Santana nodded.

"We are. Look, we can check it out, check her out. If it works out, all the better. But we're not going in blind," she went to get the laptop.

They had gotten to doing just that. From the information Quinn had already received, they had found more. Claudia MacManus was a doctor, married to a teacher named Lucas Halstead, no children. They both got by well enough, not rich by any means. And when they had been robbed, nothing had been taken, nothing except the marble elephant.

"Amateurs," Santana had chuckled.

"Which might be good news for us," Quinn pointed out, looking at her partners. Brittany and Santana shared a look, considering their options.

"They got the job done, even if they only took the elephant. Someone hired them to get it, and they succeeded. The robbers are not the ones we should be worried about, it's their boss," Santana reminded her.

"So let's see who the boss is," Brittany took over on the computer; Santana would never had let Quinn pull that move.

The job was already out of the ordinary on its own. Clients were never to know their true names, but then Claudia did not know about Trinity, and she only knew Quinn. There would be no payment for a job done, not this time. The only payment they could look forward to was the woman's happiness.

The elephants had been retrieved, without a hitch. They had been packed up in a box and dropped off at Claudia's door, without any other markings than words scribbled on top. These should be yours. Keep them safe.

Quinn had stood in hiding after she'd delivered the box, waiting to see that the doctor would get it. Claudia had opened the box right there outside her house, and when Quinn saw the expression on her face, it had made her smile. It was for people like her that she'd begun doing this job, and as big as things had gotten, she never wanted to forget this.

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!