Author's Note: I figured since that today is my last day off before I have to go back to school, I might as well write another chapter to this since I totally don't have a hundred other things to do right now. This chapter's mostly filler, with pretty much no dialogue, but I figured if I wrote it this way I could skip the awkward leaving the airport and getting to the UCLA campus phase. Sadly, there's no still no Jesse (at least not in person). However, I'm going to intro him in the next chapter or maybe two. Enjoy!
Quinn had fully intended to sleep her entire way to California, as the flight to LAX was seven hours, but after the encounter with Finn, there was really no way she could fall asleep with her brain refusing to shut up. A million emotions, namely guilt, bombarded her senses from the moment she had stepped onto the plane. She had done so much to hurt Finn over the years, and here she was, leaving him behind yet again. It was true, what she had said- she did love him, but they both knew they would never really work out. Of course, that couldn't stop the pain she felt from walking away from him.
After wasting an hour trying to sleep, Quinn finally gave up and reached down to her bag, digging through it to find her laptop. Despite the fearless, unworried facade she had put up for her mother and friends at the idea of UCLA, Quinn was truly terrified of leaving her life behind. However, being Quinn Fabray, she wasn't going to let fear stop her from starting her life over. But since she wasn't to California yet, she resolved that she could allow herself relish her high school memories one last time. There were numerous videos of the glee club saved on the laptop, some of actual performances, and others of them just goofing around. In all, there were about one hundred videos, and Quinn couldn't bring herself to pick and choose what to watch, so she decided to watch them all, or at least as many as she could before she landed.
By the time the flight was within thirty minutes of Los Angeles, Quinn had watched about seventy of the videos. Many had brought laughter to her lips (and several glares from other passengers), and others had brought tears to her eyes, such as the performance at that first Regionals, or their Nationals winning routine from just last spring. Deciding she had time for one more video before packing her bag, Quinn pressed the next button on the computer, fully expecting a video from some random Invitational she couldn't remember. Instead, she found footage of not New Directions, but Vocal Adrenaline performing Bohemian Rhapsody. Her first instinct was to shut it off immediately, but the girl's natural curiosity got the better of her, because she had no idea how the hell it had gotten onto her laptop, and frankly, Vocal Adrenaline had been just too good back then not to watch.
Quinn tried to remember when the video was from, as she was certain she had never seen the performance at all. Then she noticed the all too familiar face that was singing lead. Jesse St. James. So this... this was their performance at Regionals sophomore year. Quinn's throat clenched as she came to this realization, because that meant she had been giving birth while this had happened. She hadn't thought of Beth's actual birth for a long time, and the painful memory became too much. Reminded of why exactly she was going to California, Quinn slammed the laptop shut without bothering to listen to the rest of the admittedly quite fabulous performance. She shoved her the laptop back into her backpack and grabbed her iPod.
A while later, Quinn's eyes snapped open at the sound of a very bored flight attendant's voice drifting over the speakers. "The plane is about to land. We ask all passengers to secure their seat belts now, as the descent will begin in about two minutes. If anyone has forgotten how to fasten the seat belt, instructions are printed on the ceiling above you."
The next fifteen or twenty minutes were a blur for Quinn. She was finally here. In Cali fucking fornia! Her recent qualms about leaving Lima and her old life behind were gone as excitement took its place. At last, Quinn would get her fresh start, a chance to become a whole new person, in a place where no one had to know about her past.
It was incredible to think about, to say the very least.
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