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 55th cycle. Now cycle 56!
"Take A Look"
(Older) Quinn, Brittany/Santana
Trinity series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)
1. Look Back
Some time before
The job they had pulled at the McKinley reunion, if they could call it that, had not been their first official job. If it counted at all, they would call it job zero.
But now it was another matter. Quinn had agreed to take them on, going so far as to get an apartment for the three of them to share, making their partnership official. They had all moved in, and although it had all required some adjustment at first, they had found a rhythm of life, as a trio. And now she had a job for them, a real one, with actual stakes involved. When they had come home that night, she was waiting for them. They saw her sitting at the table, and the air felt different.
"Please, sit," she indicated. They had come and joined her, and then she'd slid an image toward them. "We're going to be retrieving this," she informed them, and their faces grew serious as well.
"Where is it?" Santana asked.
"In a museum vault," Quinn told her before showing them another image, a floor plan. "This is only partial, we're going to need to get some eyes around the place before we can move ahead."
"Right, we can do that," Santana nodded, looking to Brittany.
"We should have code names, shouldn't we?" was the first thing she spoke of, and the others stared at her. "Well, what if we talk, and they hear us, and we say each other's names, and they figure out who we are? If we use fake names, then they can't tell who we are."
"That's… actually a good point," Quinn told her, sitting back, and Brittany looked pleased.
"What kind of names? Like actual names, or just words…" Santana asked.
"We can figure it out as we go along," Quinn suggested, and they understood: they had more important matters to discuss.
They were nervous, all of them, at the prospect of doing this for the first time, really doing it. As much as they could pretend otherwise, they knew it wasn't true, and they did have concerns. But then how could they not? Quinn, as much as she was happy not to be going it alone anymore, had not completely gotten over the fact that her best friends of way back when were now ready to put everything on the line to help her. She still felt like she was not helping them at all, and if she wasn't so selfish, she would have said no. For their part, Brittany and Santana were very aware of the fact that once they did this with her, this first job, then there would be no going back. It would be a fact, a fixed reality, that they were thieves, and had broken the law. They knew it was to do good in the end, but it wouldn't be seen that way if they were ever caught; they knew that as well.
The job in itself had been a mess.
They were all still trying to get their signals in order, and they were trying to decide on these code names, which led to confusion when they would try to contact each other. They had done their prep work, they'd run through the steps, but this was the first time they were actually trying to pull it off for real, and nerves got in the way. How they had managed to get what they'd come for and make a clean exit, they had no clue, but they did.
They hadn't spoken a word of it until they were back in New York, back in their apartment. They had filed in through the door, all of them exhausted, all of them with too many thoughts coursing through their minds, and part of them would have been plenty happy calling it a night and picking up in the morning, but then…
"You should be called Breaker," Brittany had spoken up, and the other two had turned around.
"Who, me?" Santana asked, but Brittany shook her head and pointed to Quinn.
"Because you break the codes… and the safes," she explained.
"Yeah… sounds good," Quinn had agreed slowly, as they all stood where they were, one at the door, one near the kitchen, the other heading toward the bedrooms… They had started moving closer after a beat. "You should be Optic, since you've got your eye on everything," she stared to Santana, who had to smile.
"What about me?" Brittany had asked. Santana came up to her.
"I'm thinking… Sneak… I think you can figure out why."
"Yeah," she smiled. They looked to Quinn, and they knew they had to talk about this job they had returned from.
"Maybe I should have started you guys smaller. I took you from an easy grab to… that. I mean when I started, it was really small, so it was easier to get acclimated, to go deeper each time… We just weren't ready for something like this, as the three of us."
"But we will be, right?" Brittany asked.
"Of course we will," Santana nodded.
"I never said I'd give up on you two," Quinn assured Brittany, and Santana as well.
"Good," Brittany smiled. "We'll do better next time."
Their second job, while still in need of polishing, had been a vast improvement compared to the first one, and it had helped to convince not just Quinn, or Brittany, or Santana, that this unit of theirs could actually work. And by the third job, they could honestly say that everything had gone as they would have liked.
"Figures it would be the third job where we'd find our footing," Santana had commented. "Once a trinity, always a trinity."
TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)
