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 75th cycle. Now cycle 76!


"Mothers & Daughter"
(Older (Quinn),) Santana/Brittany, Florence (OC)
Trinity series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

To say that their lives had been changed in these last three months was putting it so mildly it barely touched base. As much as they thought they were prepared, after months of anticipation, there was no real way of being prepared for the change that was brought on by Florence's birth.

It was fair to say that the beginning had been chaotic. Lack of sleep coupled with paranoia that there might ever be something wrong with their daughter had left both Santana and Brittany scrambling at times. Brittany still wanted Santana to take things easy, so whenever they needed something, she would go out and get it with such haste it was clear she didn't want to be away for longer than she needed to be. Santana for her part was feeling the need to move, after having been told to keep things calm for so long.

But for whatever amount of chaos that there might have been, there was just that much more of those other moments, where they looked on to this tiny new person and they felt their hearts swell with sudden and irreversible love, knowing that she was theirs, and then the rest did not matter so much.

Nowadays, this was what they latched on to, much more than anything else. They had found their rhythm, and their new life had taken shape, molded around motherhood and a baby girl who made them smile simply for being alive, and happy, and healthy.

On some nights, Brittany would claim her body could predict their daughter's waking, which would manifest with her waking up, getting out of bed and into the nursery, just as the baby was starting to fuss. As soon as she looked ready to start crying, Brittany would pick her up, and she would go and sit with her in the rocking chair which had been a present from Winger. Florence would settle down before long, so long as her needs had been attended to.

"It's alright, Flo, I got you," Brittany would promise, holding on to the girl's little hand and smiling when she felt her grasping.

"How do you even do that?" She looked up to find Santana standing there, still half asleep and yawning. "I heard her cry and you were already gone," she dragged her feet as she came closer, but she found her energy as she looked down to their daughter.

"No idea," Brittany smirked, getting up to leave the chair to Santana and handing the baby over once she was seated. Santana gently brushed to the fringe of dark hair slowly growing along Florence's head, while Brittany knelt next to the chair, looking on. "Tell us a story?" she smirked, and Santana chuckled.

"I don't think so, it's a little late," she pointed out. "Or a little early, I have no idea what time it is."

"A song then," Brittany decided.

"Britt," Santana gave her a look.

"Fine," the blonde sighed, which stretched into a yawn.

"The sooner she sleeps easier, the sooner we will, too," Santana pointed out. After a moment, though she'd turned down the suggestion of a song, she did hum lightly, calling on the gaze of her wife, who would sit there and listen, as susceptible to the power of her voice as the baby was. Still, when she stopped, Brittany pondered aloud.

"Do you think we'll ever tell her? About what we used to do? About Trinity, and…"

"Quinn?" Santana finished for her, guessing. Brittany slowly nodded. "I don't know. It might be better that we kept all that buried." The choice of word did come back to her as slightly off putting, but they both let it go. "Trinity, I mean… Obviously we'll tell her about Quinn, even if it can't be the whole story."

"Maybe we still could. She doesn't need to know that's what it really is. We can just make it up, like a story, about superhero girls, doing good," she mimed something that might as well have been called 'the fist of justice,' and Santana smirked.

"So long as we don't fill her head with ideas that are too dangerous, I'm up for that," she told her wife, who nodded quietly.

"We can rework the truth a little," Brittany went on, "Besides, wouldn't it be bad if we were too specific? Someone might hear and connect the dots."

"Who is our daughter hanging out with exactly in that scenario?" Santana frowned, amused. "She won't be talking for a while yet," she reminded her.

"Right, well… You never know," Brittany raised her chin.

Amused as they were, they could both tell that, having brought up the subject of Quinn, there was still a twinge of the feelings that came with it. It had been long enough now that they didn't go about bursting into tears at the mere mention of her, but they still felt sad, and they didn't see that ever really going away, whether it was one year or twenty. Quinn had meant much more to them than they could ever put into words for their daughter, especially if she wasn't to know about Trinity. It still did not rest easy with them, just how suddenly and unexpectedly she had been ripped away from them.

How many stories would there be, stories that were the kind any child might expect to hear from their parents, about how they came to be where they were at, that they would need to alter, for the sake of protecting the truth? Their engagement had taken place in the middle of a job, for one. But there was so much more to them. Their story spanned years, from Lima, and McKinley, and New Directions, to Boston and dance school, and New York, and a simple life, and then Trinity, and losing it, losing Quinn, marriage, pregnancy, and now a daughter they loved more than words… Whatever stories they could not tell her, there was that much more to choose from and delight her with.

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!