A/N: Hi. Jumping on the future fic bandwagon here. The first two chapters are a sort of segue, a (well at least I tried to be) brief overview of their lives since leaving Lima and an illustration of the more important points. Written in their own words, alternating with each chapter between Tina and Artie. I have the first two chapters written up and am starting on the third, though I suspect no one will really be interested until they meet up again (Which will happen in the third chapter) I figured there was no harm in putting this up early. Enjoy!

(Disclaimer: I don't own Glee.)

The train to New York City was empty, or at least my compartment was. Whenever we stopped I could hear the faint sound of commuters through the doors, but no one encroached on my territory. It had been unseasonably chilly for late august, and all of the other cars were at least ten degrees warmer than this one, whether by faulty technology or unseen holes, and other people walked through, looking for warmer quarters. I just snuggled deeper into my giant sweatshirt, deeper into the worn pleather seats, and tried to disappear.

Now would be a great time to reflect on the last year and a half of my life, I though bitterly to myself. That's what people did in stories, or movies. Exposition, I remembered from a far off English class back before all I'd wanted to do was get the hell out of Lima. I'd never understood why exposition was so important. Anyway, this is a story about starting over, not dwelling on the past. I left Lima and severed all ties to the world. I wasn't TTTTina C, who first auditioned for Glee club because her best friend told her he would if she did. I wasn't Tina Cohen-Chang, the slightly more confident goth girl who could never seem to finish her solos. I wasn't even Tina, the girl who graduated the same way she'd started school, lost in a crowd of people who all looked the same to her.

I was someone else, even more lost. Anything that had defined me in high school was stripped away, from the colorful streaks in my hair to the proto-gothy persona I'd thrown up like a shield. I was scrubbed clean, dressed in demure colors and ready to pretend I was someone else.

And the train rumbled on, through stop after stop, and I wondered to myself if this was all just a colossal mistake.

I passed the first six months of college in anonymity. I never even met my roommate. All I got was a note on her pillow, saying she was staying with a friend in the East Village and I could do whatever the fuck I wanted with the room. For some reason, That made me want to throw something at the wall. The dent's probably still there. I made good use of her side of the room, don't worry. I worked on a theatre production a girl named Amy who lived on my floor put on, in some cramped black box theatre that seated around twenty people on a good day. I wasn't in it, of course, even though she asked me to audition. I made myself busy painting the set, kneeling on the floor with a bucket of black paint until the knees of my jeans were worn out and I could barely see the faded blue denim under the tar thick splotches. The set looked awesome, and I buried the jeans in my closet and forgot about them.

I hunted for jobs wherever I could find them, but my first real good job came around the six month mark when an alt rag picked me up to push pencils and study under the Editor in chief, with a promise to move up if I showed potential. It was clutching the envelope full of cash that was my first paycheck and hurrying out the door of the little ATM down the block from my new office that my real college experience began. I would have missed it, but there was something that sparkled in the window of the little shop across the street that caught my eye, and before I knew what I was doing I was standing at the counter, clutching a bottle of bright lavender dye to my chest while the cashier rang up my other purchases.

All the way back to my dorm, I wondered what had possessed me, whether I'd done something smart, what I was thinking, but as soon as I was pinning my hair up in layers in the bathroom, I knew. Later, falling asleep on a pillow that would never quite recover from the purple tinted water seeping into it, I felt whole for the first time since I'd arrived.

The next day, dressed in the paintstained jeans I'd forgotten about months ago and a few choice black articles I'd managed to scrimp, I was kneeling on the floor of my closet, fishing through the various debris to be found there. It was a half-forgotten dream, the day I'd packed, and the only thing that I remembered was the end, staring down at the overstuffed bags and needing something to remind me of who I was. There! In the back of the closet where I'd thrown them in anger, or shame, were my favorite pair of battered black combat boots. "Success."

I definitely garnered a few stares that day as I went through my classes. It felt weird, I doubted anyone had even known my name before that day, but now, they definitely noticed me. Standing in the cavernous cafeteria, about to pay for my food, I felt hair brush against my shoulder. Turning around I caught a flash of deep purple hair. Someone was leaning on my shoulder, creamy dark hands fiddling with my hair and what I assumed was a scrap of their own.

I turned farther. There was a boy (at least I was pretty sure it was a boy, although he was so androgynous I was going based on the lack of a chest area at that point) standing behind, me, grinning mischievously through a waterfall of royal purple hair. "Your hair is gorgeous. Come sit with us." Without waiting for me to answer, he grabbed my wrist in one hand and my tray of food in the other and pulled me over towards a table in the back.

Three other people were slumped around it, a tall boy with white blond hair pulled into a messy ponytail that cascaded down his back, a tiny girl with fluffy bright green hair, and a dark haired girl who stood and pulled me into a hug as soon as I'd set my tray down next to her. "I'm Maya. That was Jazz." She nodded her head over to the boy, who had plunked down across from me, still grinning like a jackal. "He's been eyeing your hair from across the room for ten minutes." They laughed, the easy laugh of people who were entirely comfortable with each other. I sunk deeper into my seat.

"So, what's your name?"

"T-Tina." Maya laughed. "Don't look like that, Tina. We're not going to bite you. Contrary to popular belief, we're not vampires." She paused and considered. "I'm not a vampire. Ness is sometimes but only when she wants your attention." The green haired girl crossed her arms. "We prefer the term 'Nosferatu', thank you very much. Vampire has a connotation to be avoided in modern society." I laughed. "You're telling me. My principal was convinced I was a vampire in high school." A round of laughs went up around the table, and for the first time since graduation I felt like here was somewhere I might belong. Ness looked over at me. "You don't look too much like a vampire today." I shrugged. "That was then. I got rid of my she-demon wardrobe after graduation." I looked down at my lap. "I thought I didn't want it anymore."

"Well if you want the look back, there's this great place in SoHo... Ooh or that one in the East Village-"

"Yes! And what about that little strip of shops we found way down by..."

"Or that Trashion market that's only open on- Hey That's this weekend!"

"Tina! Shopping trip!" Ness crowed. "Maya and I know everywhere there is to know to get awesome clothes on a tight budget. It will be grand!" She raised her arms theatrically. Maya nodded. "It'll be fun. As long as you want to come, of course." She looked up at me expectantly, soft dark eyes questioning. How could I refuse? "Sure. It's time I made some friends around here." Ness cheered, and the blond boy, who's name I would later learn was Jake, launched into a discussion about a new used record store that had popped up around the corner from his place, and I just laughed along, and felt something, camaraderie, stirring in my chest. Friends.

That Sunday morning I was awoken by loud rapping on my door. "Tina? I know you're in there. It's Maya and Ness. Are you awake?" There was sounds of a scuffle, and then someone banging hard enough on my door I was afraid it might break. "TINA. THIS IS NESS, AKA YOUR WAKEUP CALL. BITCH, GET YOUR ASS OVER TO THIS DOOR AND LET US IN BEFORE I AM FORCED TO BREAK IT DOWN." I scrambled out of bed, as fast as someone who has just been woken up can scramble, and opened the door. "Fuck you." Ness beamed at me. "Fuck you too. Are you ready to go?" I growled at her and pulled a sweatshirt over the tank-and-sweats combo I'd fallen asleep in. Ness gave a disapproving cluck at my outfit, but Maya smiled a rich, warm smile and hooked her elbow in mine. "Come on, sugar. We've got miles to go before we drop."

We spent the day gallivanting from one shop to another, trying on much more than we even considered buying. Still, when twilight had almost fallen and we were returning to my place, I had spent more than I had since I'd trashed my look, and I felt comfortable in my own skin for the first time in what felt like aeons. When we got to my room, I turned in the doorway, expecting to say goodbye, but Ness was too quick, she bounced past me and flopped down on my bed. "Mmmm. I really love what you've done with the place. It's very..." she searched for the word, "Basic. Now if it was my room, I'd..." She sprang up again, her seemingly boundless energy taking her around the tiny room, touching the walls and explaining her plans to me. I laughed. "If you want to do all that, you should just move in." She shrugged. "Okay. I'll bring my stuff around tomorrow." With that, she bounded out of my dorm again, not even sparing me a wave goodbye. Behind me, Maya chuckled. I jumped, startled. I'd almost forgotten she was there. "She's always like that. It takes some getting used to, but once you do... she's great." She sat down lightly on my bed, next to me, arm brushing mine, with that same slow sweet smile that made anyone want to melt. At least, I hoped it was anyone. Falling in love with my best friend (again), would do me no good at all. And yet...

I brushed off the feeling, grinning back at her. "Yeah. I think I can see it, already. You... all of you, are great."

"Do you want to grab a bite to eat? I'll buy." She quirked an eyebrow. "Uh... sure."

"Great."

After that, Maya and I tried to find a new inexpensive hole in the wall place every week, and I adjusted to life with a roomie. As it turned out, this was an easy feat. Most of Ness's classes started somewhere around sunset, and after that she had the late shift as a deejay at some club or another. She stumbled into her pillow as I was brushing my teeth, and bumped shoulders with me in the doorway as I dragged my feet home, usually after clocking in extra hours at the magazine office, filing paperwork until my head spun.

I discovered, again, the benefits of friendship, sitting head to head with Jake in the library discussing the effects of Christian rock on atheists or spending hours watching and learning from Jazz, who's flew faster and more fluidly than anyone I'd ever met. He was better than my instructors, for sure. Ness and I would wander the city aimlessly, taking silly pictures of each other dancing on fountains or hiding in the bushes in central park, or ducking into tiny mysterious places that we would manage to find only once, and never again, regardless of how long we looked. I spent hours with Maya, she was a native New Yorker who knew the ins and outs of the place better than anyone else. She'd drag me all the way out to Brooklyn to show me a coffee shop that had the best hot chocolate I'd ever tasted, or take me to SoHo to a restaurant where the tables were chalkboards and they projected Charlie Chaplain films on the walls. I barely left the city during the summer break, apart from two weeks where I went home to help my parents move across town, I was invited to stay with Maya in the apartment she shared with her mother, a kind, aging Latina woman who spoke English fast and Spanish faster, and who treated me like a daughter. When the school year started up again, I moved back into my dorms. Like my mother, Marisol drove me crazy.

A few weeks before Christmas break, Amy asked me to paint another set. Poised at the top of a ladder marking out the finer details of a huge night club sign, I took a hard fall, ending up at home on bed rest with my entire right leg up in a cast, bored out of my mind. While my friends made plans for Christmas parties and shopped for presents, I watched Buffy re-runs and wondered if I'd be able to dance in time for the final show and if this would affect my grade. I was about to shoot myself to get it over with when one night a light tapping sounded on my window. Widening my eyes, I looked outside, and grinned when I saw Maya, illuminated from behind by a softly glowing streetlight, leaning against the fire escape. Fumbling with the latch, I opened the window and she climbed in like a cat, discarding her heavy coat and plopping down beside me. "I thought you might want the company."

We spent every night together, curled up on my bed with my laptop propped up between us, celebrating ever bit of recovery, when it was announced I was allowed to do more than hobble from bed to bathroom and back, and when the cast was changed, the hairline fracture on my thigh deemed healed enough to go without, provided I went easy on it, she asked me if I wanted to come to the New Years Eve party at Ness's club and I said, in that same timid voice I always used with her, "Um... Sure."

Maya looked stunning, on New Years Eve, draped in a glittering floor length black dress that hugged her curves. She swept me out to a table where the rest of our friends, sans Ness, were lounging, party snacks and glasses of champagne in hand. I sat with them, as the night spun on, laughing about nothing, glad more than anything to be out of the house. As the midnight hour approached, Maya tugged on my arm, leading me out to the dance floor, despite my feeble protests, and we swayed together until the clock struck twelve. She tipper her forehead against mine and whispered "make a wish." before leaning closer and touching her lips to mine.

Maya and I were happy. She was affectionate, not caring if we garnered stares cuddling in coffee shops and hustling down the street arm in arm, giggling like schoolgirls. She was soft, and cuddling with her, her curves, her warm arms, was bliss. But there was the part, before, or after the cuddling, where we would do... other things. I loved Maya, but there are some things I would not do. It made her sad. What I would do was with great hesitation. I loved the soft curves of a woman, and the supple lips, but beyond that... there were things I could not bring myself to enjoy.

We ended the relationship on a good note, six months, give or take, after it had begun. We were then in the summer of our third year, and everything seemed to be changing. Ness moved in and out of Jake's apartment like clockwork, sometimes enlisting my help carrying boxes at insane hours of the morning. I dropped half of my classes and changed my major from dance to journalism. The magazine fired me. I changed it back. I found work again, at another magazine that promised more hours and better work after college, if I stayed on that long. I changed my major once more. I almost didn't pass the year because of it, but ended on a high note when my current boyfriend, Jackson, invited me on a cruise over the summer with his family. Even though we spent the second half of it fighting and I nearly threw his racist father off of the ship on more than one occasion, I came back my final year tanner and ready for action.

Halfway through the year when Ness and I were discussing our plans for the future, she mentioned "Well, if you... wouldn't mind continuing to live with me, you know, splitting the rent's cheaper and I was thinking... Well, I saw... there's this apartment on the same street as Jake's and the rent's cheap and..." we moved in the next week, figuring that hitting while the market was hot seemed like a good idea, and with a couple extra shifts on both our ends, we managed to graduate without losing the apartment.

My work pulled through and they gave me a deal, I could write the hard hitting articles, if I would also take up reviewing clubs and bars on the side. I accepted. Ness was still deejaying from dusk 'til dawn, with added potential, a scout had picked her up for some punk modeling gig and she was "90% sure it wasn't a scam." Every other night, I got dolled up and hit the scene, scoping out all the best new places I heard about, usually from Ness or Jake or Jazz, who would randomly appear in my life with a different exotic lover and far fetched plan to run away together.

When I heard about Splat! and its grand opening, it seemed like the perfect place to scope out, and maybe if I was lucky, I could get the review out before anyone else had the same idea. It was the perfect opportunity. Little did I know what I would find there. Or, rather, who.

But first, let him tell you his part of the story. I'm sure you're dying to know.