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 47th cycle. Now cycle 48!

Cycle 48/Day 1000 special: So, yes, in this cycle, a milestone I had to do something special for.
In this cycle I'm passing my 1000th consecutive day of gleekathon! So for this, the cycle will feature:
* 21-day/chapter story for the Sunshine Girls series (This Little Light of Mine)
* 14-day/chapter story special for day 1000 (Let Me Tell You A Story)
* One-shot installments from 12 series + 2 non-series
* And for this cycle and this cycle alone (I swear), 7 'triple shift' days, with 3 chapters/stories going up in the day!

IT'S DAY 1000!
So here we are then, four digits… I'm as shocked as you are ;) Shocked and giddy :D Anyhoo I just wanted to say real quick, if you're out there, and you read my stories, either every day, or every other day, here and there, whatever, if you read my stories, I want to say thanks :D In a little over three months it will have been three years, so let's go! :D (If you want to say hi, the review box is right there ;))

This is a triple shift day. There will be two more uploads today: This Little Light of Mine, chapter 13 and Let Me Tell You A Story, chapter 13.

"The Future Marries the Present"
Sue & Brittany
Sylvesters series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

(A/N: Please read the info above the line! Thanks!)

Sue had not gone to Regionals, but she knew very well she would come to hear about it when Brittany got home. She would get dropped off at her dad's but then she was supposed to come here for dinner. Sue wasn't one to go all out for dinner, but every once in a while she would decide to kick things up a bit. Finally though, she'd heard the door, and with it a voice.

"Hello?" Brittany called.

"In the kitchen," Sue called back. The girl came dashing in, still wearing her costume, hair bunched up in a messy bun Sue guessed had been made on the bus coming home. "How w…"

"We won!" Brittany announced, and Sue looked up as she went on. "We won, we're going to Nationals in New York!" Sue watched her, all smiles, and still her body's reaction was to clam up.

"Good for you," she managed to say. There was a look on Brittany's face, like she wanted to ask something, like maybe 'you're not going to screw this up for us, are you?' but she was too excited and she decided against it.

"I'm going to go change," she ran off to her room, and Sue watched her go. She couldn't have followed her if she wanted to, feeling her stomach sink with realization all of a sudden, the kind of thinking that was bound to hit her eventually.

Her daughter was growing up. It was easy not to think about her that way most times, with how innocent she could be, but it didn't change the fact she was seventeen now, a junior, and then next year she'd be a senior… and then what? She would go off and lead her own life, as she should, but then…

Sue would be alone again. First it was New York and Nationals this year, and then maybe she would just go away, to New York again or any other place. The world would open to her, and that frightened her mother for so many reasons, and selfish or not, the first one had to be the part about her being left behind.

It was easy not to get as bothered about her lack of a love life or any real social life because at least when she got home, there was her daughter to love her. More recently that had been made harder, first by Brittany's getting in touch with her father and his family, her going to live there some days of the week. And then there had been their cold period, her whole master plan to get her off the Cheerios, which had worked in the end though with some unforeseen side effects in losing Quinn and Santana as well.

But they had gotten better after that, and the thought that she could be away again, in a whole new way, leaving Sue to come to an empty home… She could see very clearly the eventuality where she would become that crazy cat lady… That was not something she looked forward to.

But then there was Brittany herself. Could she handle that world on her own? She was still so young, and more than that she had a way of looking at things that made her very vulnerable to manipulation… She should know, she had used that to her advantage before. She had a good heart in her, something Sue was so very proud of, but that would only take her so far before someone tried to use that good heart, and then what happened?

Her education wasn't what Sue could have hoped for, and she felt responsible for that to some extent. She had wanted her to have it all, and Sue was very well placed to get her that. By all rights, Brittany would never have been able to make Cheerios without her. She had the talent, without a doubt, but on the matter of grades it was a whole other story. She thought maybe it would motivate her, but instead they were here and Sue didn't know how to fix it without breaking that precious heart.

Brittany wasn't ready for that world… or maybe Sue wasn't ready for her to be ready for that world. She just thought about it, and she saw her get eaten up alive. She didn't want that for her.

And then there was their secret, the foundation to everything in their lives for so many years already. When this had all started, she had no way of knowing how far this would stretch, how much it would become part of their day to day from the time Brittany was just a small girl until she towered at her mother's side.

In a little over a year's time she would leave McKinley High, and she would no longer be her student. But then her mother, that Doris Sylvester, was still out there, like an unseen shadow over them. Once Brittany was out of her home, if anything, she would be even more at risk. Sue wouldn't be there to protect her, from the world, but also from Doris... What did it mean that deep inside she just wanted her mother to just die already?

She knew what she just wanted most of all was to liberate her daughter, to stop having her need to lie all the time, to be able to look at her, to say "That's Sue Sylvester, she's my mother." If there was one thing she wished, it was that she hadn't had to feel the need to raise her into this mindset that made lying so easy. Her daughter was such a good person, and she was a loving person, and if her mother told her to lie, she did… That wasn't right, and even she could see it.

It was all about the unknown, she knew. So long as she was here, with her, at home, at McKinley, even if the days themselves couldn't be foreseen, there was still a sense of knowing where they were, where they had been all her life, since the day she had been born. But next year, all that would change, and Sue couldn't hold to 'the way things are' anymore. Now a whole lot of new roads would open and she had no way to see which one Brittany would take, if she would stay on it, or switch at some point, or…

"Mom?"

Sue hadn't felt her return. But then she turned around, and she was sitting there, at the table, tapping her utensils the way she would. Sue blinked, looking back and remembering what she'd been doing… cooking. She didn't know if she'd just stood there without doing a thing and for how long, but she quickly moved the pan, seeing she was this close to a fire. She shook her head to herself, breathing out.

"Are you okay?" Brittany asked, and Sue looked at her.

"Screw it, how do you feel about pizza?" she asked, and Brittany's face lit up. "Pizza it is," Sue threw out the burnt things and put in the call. As they waited, she sat at the table with her daughter.

"Have you ever been to New York?" she asked.

"Of course I have, you have, too. Remember, Nationals for the Cheerios, you were eight," Brittany thought and then she smiled.

"Oh, right," she nodded. It was the second time her mother had brought her along to the competition, if she remembered right. She'd have to wait in their hotel room for the most part, but that could be fun, too. And eventually they would get to do things together. She had been so many places with her, even before she herself was part of the Cheerios… she loved that. Of course she wouldn't get to do that anymore… or would she? "Can I still come to Nationals with you?"

"You're not on the Cheerios anymore."

"No, I know, but I can stay in the room like I used to, and then we can have our vacation." Sue smiled, remembering, too. Those were some of their best memories, hands down.

"Maybe, we'll see," she told her, and Brittany looked pleased. "All in time."

Maybe it would be like this. Her daughter always had a way of reassuring her, not even realizing she was doing it.

She didn't know what the future held, but she knew what it didn't hold. It didn't hold a chance in hell of her daughter losing her love for her, and the same went both ways there, too. Brittany wouldn't stop loving her because she'd grown up. So whatever came their way, Sue just thought… bring it.

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!