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 'Genre swap' for The Theater, The Theatre, a Doctor Who/Glee crossover series story originally posted from August 12 to September 2 2014.

"Specter Theater"
(Alternate) 12th Doctor, (older) Rachel, Sophie (OC)
Doctor Who/Glee crossover series

Genre swap: Horror/ghost story

It had been part of the theater's lore for more years than any of them could ever say. There had always been stories being passed from one person to the next, about strange and unexplainable occurrences happening inside the theater. Many times these would be told to spook the child actors who passed through their doors, though the adults were not spared in this, and often were just as gullible as the children, if not more so. Several of them swore they knew what was behind all this, swore that the theater was haunted, and some did hold to the fact that they had seen some of these ghosts themselves, though with how rampant the stories were, more often than not, this would be chalked up to it being another prank.

Rachel Berry didn't think it was made up, not at all. True, in the very beginning, when she'd gotten her first role in a musical being presented here, she'd considered the stories nothing more than stage hands having fun at her expense. But a lot had happened since then, many years, many events, some of which she just could not ignore. She wouldn't say that these had played into her buying the theater, but since it had become hers, she'd spent even more time inside its walls, and their ghosts were no myth to her.

She'd been willing to let it all be nothing more than what the others would make of it, for a long time, but now things were changing. The ghosts used to be so hard to actually see that it made it easy to keep the whole presence something more like a secret, a rumor, a gag… If it became that they were everywhere, for all to see, then it could only spell trouble. Thankfully, Rachel had someone to turn to.

Some would have called her Jane Smith, but she preferred to be called the Doctor. Rachel had known her for years, since before the haunted theater, before Broadway, before being a wife, a widow, a mother… Soon her daughter would be a mother herself, and Rachel wondered how she would react if she learned all those stories she'd heard about her and the Doctor had been true. It had been a shot in the dark that she could even find her, and then on top of that to convince her to come and see to their ghost… uprising.

Then one morning, Rachel had found her pregnant daughter just inside the door, and by her side… "Doctor?" she breathed. "What are you doing here?"

"You left a message," the woman stood up straight. "So, ghosts, is it?"

"They are your specialty," Rachel nodded. "And these ones are getting rowdy."

"Are they? Well, better see to that."

Explaining who the Doctor was and why she was here to her daughter as quick as she could, Rachel had followed the other woman. Some would have called the Doctor a ghost hunter, and the Doctor would have told them she would not have them call her that; a hunter, to her, meant something much more violent than what she really did for the ghosts.

"There's one of them, Doctor… I think I know where we can find her. She likes to keep to the rafters."

"Show me," the Doctor agreed.

This ghost had been at once the one that made Rachel trust and distrust the ghost hypothesis… because she'd known her in life.

"There," Rachel pointed her out to the Doctor and her daughter, Sophie, when they got up near enough. Sophie gasped, and the Doctor had a hand plastered over her mouth in the next moment, preventing her from crying out and alerting the little girl ghost.

It was hard for her not to react as she did, but then they'd been children together. Annabeth Simms, that had been her name. She'd been a few years older than Sophie, but few enough that it didn't matter. They'd been friends. It was at the time where Sophie's mother played in Rise of the Fallen, in the role of the Angel. Annabeth played the young version of the iconic Cosima. Years had passed, but Sophie would never forget the day her mother had come into her room, her eyes red and running with tears, trying and failing to speak evenly as she told her that Annabeth was dead.

At the time, she wouldn't tell her what had happened. Sophie had been so young that it wouldn't have made much of a difference, as she already had some trouble understanding the concept of death. Then as she'd grown, she'd never really thought to ask. The death of her friend had left her traumatized enough, not knowing at the time that she was a few bare years from losing her father, too. The one thing she had learned in time was that Annabeth had died at the theater, but that no one had known for certain how.

"Annie?" Sophie stepped up. Rachel tried to stop her, but the Doctor put a hand to her arm and shook her head: let her. The child looked down at the sound of the voice calling to her.

"Who are you?" she spoke.

"It's me… Sophie… Sophie Perry. We were friends once, remember? I… I grew up." The ghost didn't respond. "Annie…"

"Who's Annie?" she asked. Sophie looked back to the Doctor, who now joined her.

"Cosima, is it?" Her ears perked up at this and she nodded. "Good to meet you. I am the Doctor."

"Hello," Cosima/Annabeth greeted her merrily.

"Tell you what, why don't you come down here so we don't have to crane our necks so?" The girl considered this a moment before standing and walking across the rafters, as though on a tightrope. Rachel realized after a moment that she was holding her breath, which she realized was silly, this being a ghost, but then she felt so real…

"Who's Annie?" the girl asked again when she'd come to join them. They hesitated, but the Doctor gave them a look: tell her.

"She's y…" Sophie started to say, but her mother cut in.

"Annabeth Simms," Rachel told her. "She was only a girl, only your age. She was an actress here in this theater."

"Where did she go?" Cosima/Annabeth asked.

"She died," Rachel revealed. "In this place." Without prompt, the small ghost had looked over her shoulder, to the stage below the rafters. "They found her body one morning, down on that stage there." The Doctor looked where the girl looked. Rachel looked to her daughter. Sophie was trying to hide the way she cried, seeing the girl, knowing who she was meant to be, remembering how she'd felt about her death, and now… hearing about her demise.

"What happened to her?" Cosima/Annabeth wondered. Rachel lost her voice for a moment, but she had to go on. It had to mean something, with how the Doctor was insisting.

"It was never known for sure. As far as anyone could tell, she'd been running up there," she pointed to the rafters. "She fell. Some thought it was an accident, others said she might have been chased, or that there'd been a struggle..."

"She… She liked to play here," Cosima/Annabeth told them. "She could see everything that way, and she saw… she saw…" She gasped, crouching out of sight.

"Hey, now, it's alright, you're safe," the Doctor calmly told her.

"Him," the ghost pointed, and they looked.

"Who's that?" the Doctor asked Rachel.

"Tom? He works the lighting. He worked here years ago, but he left. He came back…"

"What, when your ghosts became, as you say, rowdy?" the Doctor guessed, and Rachel blinked. "She's the one agitating them, I'd be ready to wager," she indicated the ghost girl.

"Cosima… You know who you are, don't you?" Sophie understood. "What did he do?"

"I don't know… I don't know… I don't… Can't let him see me…"

But he had seen her. She'd hidden whenever she saw him, ever since his return, but now she hadn't been able to hide when he turned, and he saw her, and it was easy to say she was a ghost from his past. But in time they learned the truth, the things even Annabeth had forgotten.

Tom had long tried to protect the little actress, having told her time and time again not to play up there the way she did, but she wouldn't listen. And one day she fell. Her costume remained snagged on the rafters, and as she struggled to pull herself up, he had seen her. He went, and he tried to pull her up, to free her, and he succeeded, at the expense of her sleeve, but then he made the mistake of putting her down and letting her stand. She lost her balance, and this time nothing stopped her descent. She fell, she crashed, and he… he ran. It was something that had haunted him for years. He never knew if he could have saved her, didn't even know why he'd been pushed to run, only that he did.

Now she knew, and she reclaimed herself, as Annabeth Simms, and with that, the stirring of the spirits inside the theater was ended. They would never leave, the Doctor believed, not for good. But they would be at peace again, just as they had been before, and they could deal with that. The Doctor didn't believe they should be chased away, and Rachel trusted her word on that.

Some nicknamed it Specter Theater. It was a term of endearment for those in the know. There were those who didn't believe in the ghosts, but there were those who did. Why they clustered to the theater, it was unclear, but they didn't need to know. This was where they lived, where life still breathed in them, in the place where similarly ghost like creatures, characters, were brought to life, and how was that any different from their own existence?

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!