It was hard to know how Quinn would have evolved, if she ever would have discovered that part of herself, and, if she had, whether she would have let it live. In a way, it sometimes felt to Lucas like a blessing that the swap had made whatever Quinn's "coming out" process would have been both unnecessary and, though Lucas couldn't seem to tame his curiosity about it, irrelevant. Quinn had been spared the incurable panic that would have settled in her bones after that inevitable drunken girl-kiss that would no doubt have happened at some lame party her freshman year of college.

And that was a mercy, to be sure.

But most of the time, especially as the years in the "post-swap" column began to tally up, he couldn't help but feel that Quinn had been robbed, too. That whatever trajectory she might have taken, whatever the consequences would have been, at least they would have been real, and they would have belonged to her.

That loss—Quinn's defeat—hadn't truly registered with any of them until the night of Vanessa's first date with another woman. It was a few months after the name change when Vanessa had come home from work and said she was going out to dinner with a girl she'd met at the garage.

"Like a date?" Lucas had asked.

"Um, yeah. I mean, I think so."

For a fraction of a second, Quinn had been there, in Lucas, her acid tongue pressed against the back of his front teeth, ready to snap out a sharp refusal. And then, just as quickly, she was gone again, not having said a word. Winded, Lucas had gone into his room, settled down with a book, and tried to tune out the sounds of the shower running and Quinn's disembodied voice breaking through a slightly-sharp rendition of "I Can't Fight This Feeling."

When, a bit later, Vanessa had popped her head in to ask if Lucas would help her get ready, Quinn asserted herself yet again, and her first instinct was to send the book in Lucas's hands flying at Vanessa's face.

But on second thought...

It was the first time in ages Vanessa had offered her access to the body she'd foolishly expected to spend her whole life in. She didn't own that body anymore, couldn't control where it went, who it came into contact with, what happened to it. But at least this way she could perhaps give it a proper send-off.

So she'd gotten up from the bed and followed Vanessa into her bedroom. There on the dresser was the yellow bag that had once held all of Quinn's makeup. She'd eyed it possessively, longing to feel the once-familiar brushes and pencils in her hands.

"Can you do something with my hair?" Vanessa had asked, snapping Quinn from her thoughts before she could reach for the bag.

"Like what?" Quinn had scoffed.

"I don't know. Put one of those braid things in it like you used to do or something?"

In spite of herself, Quinn had climbed onto the bed behind Vanessa and began combing her fingers through Vanessa's hair. It was soft, and still a little bit damp, and from Lucas's superior vantage point, she could see auburn strands just beginning to sprout from the crown of Vanessa's head.

"Your roots are starting to show. You should have dyed it before your hot date," she'd said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

"I was thinking about just letting it grow out. That bleach stuff really burns my scalp, man."

The first tear fell before Vanessa had even finished her sentence, and suddenly, without warning, Quinn was sobbing into Vanessa's hair. She'd felt like a fool, the way she was pressing the strands to her face and blubbering like a baby over something so small. With everything she'd lost and survived, the prospect of Lucy's natural hair color making a reappearance should have been such a trivial thing.

But it was just that up until then, her blonde hair had been the only thing about Quinn that Finn had carried over to Vanessa without alteration. It was the last trace of the girl she'd spent years painstakingly making herself into, only to have lost her in an incomprehensible instant. And now this last vestige was to be lost, too.

"Hey, hey," Vanessa had said, turning, the strands of hair slipping from Lucas's fingers. "I didn't know you'd be this upset. I'll call off the date if you want."

Oh, right. The date. She'd almost forgotten.

"Don't be ridiculous; I'm fine," Quinn had said, frantically wiping the tears from Lucas's face. "I just...I think I should go back to my room."

"Are you sure?"

She hadn't answered. Just got up and went back to Lucas's room.

A little while later, Vanessa had appeared again. She was wearing a blue dress with a little white cardigan, something not so much unlike what Quinn would've—

"You look...very pretty," Lucas said, cautiously.

"I'm kinda nervous," Vanessa admitted.

There'd been something about the sadness in those eyes, Quinn's eyes, that sent a twinge of guilt through Lucas's chest; he couldn't look away.

"I shouldn't have been so hard on you," he'd said absently.

"Well, I don't want to be late," Vanessa had replied, after a moment. "You'll be here when I get back, right? I mean, you won't..."

There had been no doubt what she'd meant. Lucas knew Vanessa was taking a mental inventory of their medicine cabinet.

"I'll be here; I promise," he'd said.

But it hadn't been an easy promise to keep.

For his part, Lucas didn't date, and it wasn't just because women always assumed he was gay; it was that she was. Even if Quinn was gone forever, the ghost that lingered in Lucas was very much a girl attracted to other girls, and the prospect of dating them as a man had limited appeal.

Over the years there had been a few innocent flirtations that lead nowhere. And then came the thing that happened just after their twenty-first birthdays. The thing they agreed never to speak of again.

They'd been drinking for hours in some La Cienega dive, when Vanessa had suggested off-handedly that they bring someone home together.

It was a testament to how drunk Lucas was that he hadn't bludgeoned her on the spot, but instead just asked, "Have you lost your mind?" with a raised eyebrow.

"No. I'm just tired of watching you let my junk go bad," Vanessa whispered.

Lucas gripped the bottle in his hands a little tighter and reconsidered breaking it over Vanessa's head.

"I've been taking care of...that...just fine on my own."

"You need to get a girl on that thing," Vanessa slurred. "I mean, aren't you even curious?"

It was difficult to say exactly how they got from that moment to falling indelicately onto Finn's unmade bed, some brunette wisp of a thing pressed between them, but for Quinn, the path had been lined with torturous, unwanted memories, Finn's incessant nagging, and at least a fifth of scotch.

"I don't understand why you think that your being there will help," Quinn had said at some point.

"I don't know. Maybe seeing yourself...I mean, seeing me...like this...will make you more comfortable, right?"

At first it made no sense, but then she'd had some more to drink and it had made perfect sense; then, no sense again. And then it didn't matter because a hand was fumbling with the button of her jeans, and her first instinct was to bat it away. She'd felt this exact feeling once before, the spinning of the room combined with presumptuous fingertips grazing the flesh beneath her belly button.

She was ashamed to admit that she could never remember that moment of penetration with any sort of clarity. That fatal first thrust that had been the beginning of the end of everything she'd ever dreamed for herself. There'd just been not there, and then suddenly there, and then it was all over except for the unyielding ache that settled in the following morning and the tiny, familiar stranger that had been pulled from the rubble nine months later.

It was then that the thing lolled drunkenly against her thigh, reminding her that everything about this time was different.

Once or twice, in those first angry months of her pregnancy, she'd haphazardly wondered if having one would somehow make her feel more powerful. Now, it just made her stomach turn, the weight of a responsibility she'd never asked for hanging heavily between her legs.

She had no frame of reference for what the proper etiquette might be in a situation like this, but she needed to shift the focus away from herself in order to get her bearings back, if such a thing were even possible. So, delicately, she lifted the all-too-nimble fingers from her waistband and pressed them to her lips before nudging the stranger onto her side to face Finn.

She closed her eyes, pushed herself up to sit against the head of the bed, and drew in a deep breath.

What she saw when she opened her eyes again—

She had had dreams like that before, Quinn and Rachel tangled together. Only she was Quinn in those dreams. Now, in the swirling haze of Finn's bedroom with the thing weakly making its presence known, she realized she was very much outside of Quinn's body, and that Quinn's body wasn't quite Quinn, and that the girl whose hands seemed to be groping every place on Quinn's torso at once wasn't quite Rachel.

Even so, it was the first time she really got a sense of how it might have looked, how her fingers would have traced the delicate curve of Rachel's spine; how her eyebrows would have furrowed at the sensation of teeth nipping their way down her jawline.

There was a faint gasp, and she saw not-quite-Quinn's mouth drop open. It was then that she noticed the tan hand working its way under the skirt of Vanessa's dress. The truth of what was happening flickered through her thoughts, and though her stomach twisted uncomfortably, she couldn't manage to look away. She needed to know what would happen next, how she would have looked, would have felt, if-

It was beautiful.

It was horrifying.

It was infuriating.

Out of nowhere came a growl, and suddenly she was prying them apart.

"It's not fair!" she heard a man's voice shouting. "Do you hear me? It's not fair!"

She had Vanessa by the shoulders then, gripping her so hard that bruises would tell the tale for weeks afterward, and it wasn't until she saw the terror in those hazel eyes, heard that raspy voice shout back, "Dude! Dude! It's just me! Calm down!" that she realized who she was.

There was a mad scramble for the bathroom then, the upheaval of stomach contents, and when there was nothing left, the chest-wracking sobs of a body too dehydrated to properly form tears.

Lucas had no idea what Vanessa had said to the girl, how she'd gotten rid of her that night. And when the two of them finally started speaking again, the only thing they'd said about it was, "Never again."

And yet, from time to time Lucas still had visions of Quinn's face that night, her hands...

Back at the motel in Colorado, Lucas looked down at his broad, rough palms, his calloused fingers.

Manhands, he thought, with a laugh that quickly broke into a strangled cry.