A/N: Sorry for the delay. A little experiment: I've decided to make each chapter exactly five hundred words, excluding the title.

chapter one

this star-crossed world

Brittany shoved her hands into the pockets of her letterman jacket and stared blankly out the window.

"You okay, cupcake? You don't look so hot."

"Lately, you've been really distracted. Some ducks walked past us at the park yesterday and you looked right through them…"

"How much sleep have you really gotten in the past week?"

"That's the third time this month! If you don't get your ass in gear, Coach will murder you—"

"So that's it, then. We're breaking up."

Her breath left her mouth in shaky streams.

("God, dreamgirl," she whispered, too softly for anyone else to hear. "What are you doing to me?")

The truck lurched to a stop.

"Are you sure about this?" Finn asked. At her blank face, he rushed to explain himself, "It's just, ever since I knocked over her CD collection, Quinn hasn't been able to look at me without turning red. Like, angry I'm gonna grind your bones to dust red, not crush ask me out to dinner and I might say yes red." Brittany winced, remembering the outcome of that particular mistake. "I just don't want to make things even worse."

"Don't worry," Brittany reassured him. "Quinn likes bacon too much to eat you for breakfast."

"Really?" Finn perked up at this. "Hey, do you think she'd stop stealing my drumsticks if I bought her a pack?"

"Maybe." Brittany figured it was worth a shot, but she didn't want to get his hopes up.

"Cool. Uh, I have to pick up some stuff for my mom uptown, but there's a bus stop over on Birch we passed by earlier." Brittany remembered it vaguely. "It's a five minute walk. Do you need cash?"

"I still have some quarters saved up from when the Tooth Fairy kidnapped my baby teeth."

"Kidnapped?"

Brittany nodded seriously. "He's a menace."

"Like that English dude with the knives," Finn said. "Jack the Ripper."

"Totally."

Brittany stepped outside. She thanked her friend for the ride, words shivering a little from the sudden blast of cool autumn air. He waved off her gratitude, her advice heavy on his mind.

"Be careful," Finn said, with genuine concern, "Lima Heights can be dangerous at night."

She thanked him again. The door slammed with finality.

Finn reversed, waving one last time. His battered truck chugged forward. Brittany waited until he had turned the corner before allowing her smile to slip. Dark trails of exhaust rose and mixed with her breath, white from cold and nerves (and maybe even the tiniest bit of anticipation).

She spun on her feet: one-hundred-and-eighty degrees that felt less like a simple change in perspective and more like a necessary shift in the earth's tilt. Her world accommodating a seismic amendment (like Quinn, like dance, like adopting Lord Tubbington, like being adopted herself).

And for the first time in nearly a decade, Brittany S. Pierce found herself in the ruins of her childhood home: the Pillsbury Orphanage.

(Quinn was going to kill her once she found out.)