A/N: Sooo I didn't think this would be more than a one-shot, but after some feedback and gentle nudging I decided to keep going with it. :) I don't know how many chapters it will end up being, but there will be at least 2-3 more. With that said, enjoy and let me know what you think!

Running was absolutely not what Quinn had intended to do, but her feet seemed to be operating on their own agenda.

"I… I have to go," was all she said when she and Rachel's lips parted, and Rachel gave a little nod and let go of her lapels. Quinn took a few steps back, then up the stairs, out of the lunch quad, and quickly picked up a jog down the halls of McKinley and out into the parking lot. She was heaving in short, cold gasps of breath by the time she reached her car on the far end of the lot. Without Cheerios and glee dance numbers, she had admittedly fallen a bit out of shape. However, the quick spurt of aerobic exercise only scratched the surface of why her heart was hammering in her ears.

She had an exceptional talent for running away. It had always been her natural impulse in the face of uncomfortable emotions. By age six she had perfected the art of storming out of a room, which commanded nominally greater respect than simply running out in tears, and it was actually the taunting of her middle school peers that had prompted her to join cross country and drop all the extra weight. Running then wasn't so bad—she could lace up her shoes and jog for miles along the heavily wooded trails in the wooded lot behind their old neighborhood, unfettered by the teasing and ruthless cruelty of her classmates, or her father. It felt like something she could do that would literally put space between her and her problems, even if only for a moment. Only until her feet quit and her lungs ached and she remembered that so very rarely are we lucky enough to be able to actually outrun our problems. Angry dogs, killer bees, pitchfork mobs. Those were life's little blessings. Most problems curl up behind our ears and wait until the silent moments between heartbeats to whisper to us—I'm not going anywhere, but thanks for the ride.

Whenever she found herself thinking about it, she came close to the intensely uncomfortable realization that Yale was another attempt at running away, hidden beneath the guise of "getting out of Ohio", which was what everyone with good sense aimed to do. And it was a good plan; smart, solid, a plan with possibilities and ambition and regard. But she didn't choose Yale because it was Yale—she chose it because it was somewhere she had never been, with people she had never seen, just far enough that Ohio couldn't drop in unannounced. She was running. She ran right into the arms of that damn professor, too, and then just as quickly out of them once she realized why she thought she wanted him in the first place. It's harder to hear that little voice behind your ear when you're moaning his name during office hours, but it's still there. When the fan blades are spinning in the middle of the night, between each gentle whoosh, you hear it.

She was hearing precisely that voice as she sank down into the car, cranking up the defroster to melt away the late afternoon ice that was just beginning to creep along the bottom half of her windshield. You're running again—you've been running for years. How much longer do you think you can do it? They call it 'finding yourself', but that's a load of shit. They ought to call it 'unburying yourself.' Every time she felt like she had a breakthrough, it was only ever digging herself out from underneath one problem, just to collapse beneath the weight of another. She got pretty, then she got pregnant. She swapped one boyfriend for another, then for the first, and then it seemed nobody wanted her. She didn't even want herself.

So she made a new Quinn, and then a newer one. Pretty, punk, reformed, Yalie. She had gone through so many shades of herself just trying to find a version others could tolerate—a skin that didn't feel cracked at the knuckles and split at the cheeks—that she had managed to completely ignore the person she actually was underneath all of that. How many layers, how many personalities, would she have to peel away before she could actually say she'd 'found' herself anyway? How did she get so lost in the first place?

All of this introspection made her head spin. It was worse than her Philosophy survey course, and that was saying something, considering as they spent an entire week lecturing entirely about pushing theoretical villagers in front of a train. Quinn thought she would drive home, but ended up spinning her wheels for almost an hour aimlessly around Lima. She drove past Breadstix, past the mall, down as far as the edge of where Lima met Lima Heights Adjacent, then turned and took the long road around the business complex Rachel's dad Hiram worked in—there she was again, always behind her ear—and finally home.

She was relieved to see nobody else was home. Her mom spent most of her evenings anymore with her new boyfriend Paul, which pleased Quinn, and not just because it got Judy out of her hair on weekend visits. She really liked Paul; he was a good guy, much better for her mother than her father had ever been. At Thanksgiving he asked Quinn about herself and actually listened to the answers, and her older sister had given him a rave review after their Christmas vacation up to visit her and her fiancé. All in all, a really good guy. The kind of guy Quinn should try to find for herself one day.

Quinn suddenly felt sick, and paused at the front door before she opened it, afraid she might need to throw up into the bushes, something she had not done since Puck drove her home after a rowdy party junior year. She smirked at the memory, then felt a fresh wave of nausea hit her as she thought about Puck, and Rachel, and Finn, and Rachel, and the professor, and Rachel. She closed the door and leaned her forehead against it with a gentle thud, taking slow, calming breaths until—

"What's wrong with you? You look like you're gonna hurl." Quinn started and spun around to find Santana Lopez sitting on a barstool in her kitchen, helping herself to a bowl of cereal as she side-eyed her warily from down the short hallway.

"Santana?"

"Yeah?"

"Why are you in my house?"

"Dame Judy let me in before she left with what's-his-face, the guy with the golf shirts."

"Paul," Quinn said, steadying herself after her shock and walking into the kitchen.

"Right," Santana said with a dismissive hand wave, dripping milk onto the counter. She looked down, scrunched her nose, and wiped it clean with the sleeve of her Cardinals hoodie.

"I didn't think you were in town," Quinn said, shaking off her jacket and laying it carefully over the back of the couch in the adjacent living room.

"Well, surprise," Santana said. "I decided that being right about your demented little Bad Seed at Sectionals was enough to forgive you for slapping me, and I wanted to catch up. We haven't really talked much since then."

"Yeah, sorry about that, I've been… busy," Quinn said absently, opening the fridge door and scanning the mostly bare shelves.

"You're out of milk, by the way," Santana said, slurping the last of it from her bowl.

"Right," Quinn said.

"Where have you been, anyway? I thought you would've been home like, an hour ago."

"I was at school," Quinn said carefully. "Helping out at rehearsal…"

"Which ended over an hour ago."

"… and then catching up with Rachel," she said. She felt her face burn at the mention of her name, but couldn't think up a decent lie with her head still swimming. She took out a pint of ice cream, despite the frigid temperature outside, and hoped the cold air from the open freezer door would stop her from flushing noticeably.

"I didn't know the hobbit came back to the shire for spring break," Santana snarked, moving past Quinn to rinse out her bowl and spoon. "Well, now that you're done making out with Berry, you wanna go do hot yoga or something?"

Quinn did not hear the end of her question over the sound of the bowl in her hands dropping to the tile, shattering and sending ceramic flying across the room. Santana's eyes widened in surprise as Quinn simply stared at her, face blanched, hands still cupped as if they were holding the bowl that was no longer there.

"Shit! Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, it just, it slipped. I'm sorry," Quinn said, crouching down on her knees carefully and picking up the largest of the shards with her bare hands. Santana hoisted her up by her shoulder, though, and pushed her gently towards the living room.

"You sit," she said firmly. "You look like hell, are you sure you're okay?"

Run, run, run.

"I'm fine."

"Uh huh," Santana said, pursing her lips and clearly not content to be placated by Quinn's unconvincing affirmations. Quinn never lost her composure, but she looked jumpy and distracted as she sat on the couch with her hands in her lap, watching Santana sweep up the mess. Santana put the broom away and plunked down cross-legged on the couch next to Quinn, turning sideways to face her and holding a pillow in her lap.

"So are you gonna tell me what's going on, or am I gonna have to waterboard you?" she asked. Quinn paused for a long time before she spoke—so long that Santana began to wonder if she was even going to speak to her at all.

"What's it like, living in Louisville?" she finally asked, catching Santana completely off-guard.

"What?"

"What's it like?" she repeated. Santana furrowed her brows, but assumed this had to be leading somewhere, so she went with it.

"Louisville? Kind of hot," she said, and the way Santana's mouth rounded around the word—Lou-uh-vuhl, rather than the more northern Louie-ville—was foreign and endearing to Quinn. "Really loud, hard to sleep. Cities make a lot of noise, you don't realize until you live in one, but they're loud all night. You can't hear crickets like you do here." Quinn smirked; Santana would talk about sleep, of all things. Next to eating and tormenting her friends, acquaintances, and random strangers, it was probably one of her favorite ways to pass time. "Why?"

"Is it easier to be out in the city than it was here?" Quinn asked. Santana was at an utter loss as to where she was going with this. She shrugged.

"I dunno, I guess," she said. "Most people don't notice—it's not like I've got a J-Biebs haircut and steel-toed boots or anything. I mean, I'm open about it, people know I have a girlfriend—" Quinn did not correct her for using the present tense even though she and Brittany were not yet technically back together, though they were both single now and for all intents and purposes were a couple. "—but it's not something I have to think about every day. I guess that's different, I don't think about it all the time, I just am. In Lima everyone's so up in your business, it was kind of hard at first. Brit came to visit me in Louisville right near the end of winter break, and we walked around downtown, and we held hands. Nobody noticed. Nobody seemed to really care. That's nice, yeah—not having people stare like something's wrong with you."

"That's… that's good," Quinn said, not looking at Santana's quizzical gaze.

"Q, what's going on? Talk to me." Quinn was taken aback by the sudden softness in Santana's voice. She so rarely spoke without the harshness and barbs in her tone, it was almost like a different person speaking altogether. Quinn stared at a spot on the far wall for another long stretch of time, eyes moving back and forth, as if she were looking at something Santana could not see. When she spoke again, her voice was so raw and gritty that now Santana was the one with a stomachache.

"Why did you date so many guys before you came out?" she asked, each word slow and careful, like she'd found them on the wall in the empty space and strung them together. Santana suddenly felt very much like she knew why she was being asked all these questions. She leaned back into the couch, scooting over until her shoulder pressed against Quinn's, and crossed her ankles on the coffee table.

"Because I thought if I just dated enough of them, I'd find one who made me feel the way I had always felt about girls," she said simply, reaching out and taking Quinn's hand. She gave her a kind smile before continuing. "I kept thinking, this isn't right, this can't be right, I just haven't found the right guy yet. I thought if I just had sex with enough of them, I'd break the curse, you know? Like, maybe they were just all terrible in bed, or they didn't get me. I didn't want to think that maybe it was me who just didn't like it, me who couldn't fall in love with a guy, me who was different. That was hard… when you figure it out, like, really sit down and look in the mirror and realize that you can't run from it. You can't change the person, even if you change the scenery—" She emphasized 'scenery' in a peculiar way that made Quinn feel as if Santana was looking into her head, a feeling she had only experienced maybe once in her life. "—because at the end of the day, sabes qué, you're still you, and that isn't gonna change."

Santana fell silent, and they sat that way for a while, Quinn holding tight to her hand like she might fall off the couch, off the planet, if she let go. Quinn sank down and rested her head on Santana's shoulder, and it wasn't until she felt something warm and wet soak through the shoulder that she even realized Quinn was crying. Santana wrapped her arms around her and she began to sob openly, hanging onto Santana's hoodie and hiding her face in her shoulder, shaking with tears. She didn't say anything, for over an hour. She just cried.

Santana cried too, for her, because she knew. She knew how that felt—realizing that you've spent your entire life pretending to look for yourself, because you already knew who you were and did not want it to be true. So you looked in different places, different social groups, different wardrobes, different bottles, different one-night stands and unstable relationships. You wander as far down the path of self-destruction as your own two feet can carry you because finding yourself, that's not even half the battle. What people think is 'finding themselves' really isn't about finding yourself at all. It's learning how to love what you find.

She understood that, and for that, for Quinn, she wept.