A/N: I am so sorry this took so long. I know I say it every time, but this really was the chapter that didn't want to be written. Because I'm trying to write this entirely accurately to the show, putting a Faberry twist on this and keeping it canon and making it all link together is pretty damn hard. So it took me two weeks to come up with this, and then I had to conquer some unholy writer's block. But I finally got it done! I have also been really really busy, so on my free nights I've been too tired to write and yadda yadda excuses excuses... Either way, I'm sorry, but it's here at least! Definitely want feedback on this. I'm quite proud of the way I've managed to link things together. How Rachel really got sick. This is obviously the first part of this little 'arc' as it were, but it would have gone on for ever if I kept it in one chapter, and I wouldn't have been able to update it tonight ;D

I have Terry Pratchett to thank for my inspiration also :P I've gone through like... five of his Discworld novels in a month, and I think his writing style is rubbing off on me. At least, his complete joy in words certainly is. His attention to grammar and format just make such fantastic writing that I was like 'omg I have to keep going' with mine. So yeah, big thanks to him xD

I have done NO editing on this at all, so I'm very sorry if this is riddled with typos, more so than usual. I am not bad at spelling/grammar, just when I don't proof it, I don't realise that my brain writes faster than my hands can! And lastly, writing American is difficult. I have to keep mentally checking what I'm thinking, in case I end up writing 'pavement' instead of 'sidewalk' and all this. Sigh, sorry if any English things got into this and confuse you. Blame my country :(

Chapter 10 - Think

Quinn offered Rachel a tight-lipped smile as she passed her in the hallway. Rachel beamed jovially back at her, practically skipping away in the opposite direction. As soon as Quinn was sure Rachel was out of sight, she turned to double check and finally let out the sneeze that she had been holding back.

Several students turned to stare. It had been a pretty explosive sneeze, to be fair, and Quinn was now grinning happily. She felt better for letting it out. There was nothing worse, she decided, than trying to hold back the tickle in your nose and throat that was the tell-tale sign of a hideous expulsion of air and mucus and diseases and God knows what else through what was scientifically known as a 'sternutation'. She was currently wishing she wasn't such a good student, as actually sneezing was really gross, even if it did feel really good to finally let it out, and she didn't want to know all these stupid medical terms. It wasn't like she was ever going to be a doctor.

Her grin was quickly wiped from her face, however, as another tickle in her throat rose, but this time not to sneeze. No, this time it was to cough. Repeatedly, and seemingly endlessly. She leant against the lockers, her hand covering her mouth and gave in. It would end eventually, right? You couldn't cough yourself to death, could you? She supposed that if you had Tuberculosis you could. A cold sweat broke out. Did she have Tuberculosis? Her hand went from her mouth to her bump. Her poor baby.

Then she realised she was becoming more of a drama queen than Rachel. Maybe even more so than both Rachel and Jesse combined. Tuberculosis... Of course not. It was just a cold. And she was hiding from Rachel so that the true drama queen wouldn't find out and overreact, just like she had just been doing. She also realised that since the sudden TB scare her coughing fit had subsided and instead she was stood in the corridor on her own staring at a wall and looking like a complete freak. If she were the old Quinn Fabray, seeing herself standing there like a lunatic, she would have ordered a slushie facial for herself. Okay, now even her mental ramblings were confusing her. Hiding from Rachel was stressing her out so much that she was losing her grip on reality. Or perhaps it wasn't just hiding from Rachel, but Rachel was making her lose her grip on reality in general. Because, you know, she could drive anyone crazy with her constant babbling and her incessant pep-in-her-step. Or perhaps it was really because Quinn seemed to be falling for the brunette. Hard. But she hadn't quite grasped that concept yet.

Either way, Quinn had a cold, and she could not let Rachel know, because Rachel would force her to see all kinds of doctors, and ban her from glee, and most likely school all together. And actually, Quinn was enjoying school at the moment. Well, as much as you can enjoy school when you find yourself waddling down a corridor like a hippopotamus whilst everyone who would have once parted like the Red Sea for you, now merely glanced your way with a look of mild disinterest. Much like one would pass a discarded flyer lying on the sidewalk, stopping to glance at it, just in case it was anything worth reading, but then seeing it was actually for the bake sale at the local retirement home. Dull, and uninteresting. But, she had real friends for the first time, and glee was actually fun. It may have started out as a project to destroy, but now it was her home. And she'd be damned if she let Rachel take that from her for a measly cold.

But hiding from Rachel was far easier said than done. She would always manage to track Quinn down wherever she was, and Quinn would try to hide her sniffles, and stifle her coughs and blame her sneezing on the sudden changes in the light (which was a genuine reason for sneezing, after all).

The worst thing was when they were alone together. Quinn knew Rachel would throw all kinds of tantrums if she stopped seeing her altogether after school, and besides, resisting Rachel was entirely too hard anyway. The hardest thing, though? Trying not to kiss her. The blonde was in two minds about this. Of course, she wanted to kiss Rachel, because kissing Rachel was fantastic, and lovely and any other adjectives to be used in the place of 'wonderful', but she also didn't want to kiss her, because then she could pass the bug onto Rachel, and she didn't want to be responsible for that. For one, she would feel terrible for causing her... whatever Rachel was to her any suffering, but also because Rachel would undoubtedly be utterly insufferable when ill. She was hard enough to deal with on the best of days. But she was really hard to resist when she pouted the way she did, so of course they would end up kissing anyway.

It was only a matter of time, really, until Rachel caught it too.

Rachel was sitting in her English class, trying desperately to pay attention to her teacher talking about 'The Catcher in the Rye'. Ordinarily, she would be diligently taking notes, but today she couldn't get her mind to stay on one thing. Every time she tried to focus solely on the words her teacher was saying, she'd suddenly come around several minutes later to find she had in fact just been staring vacantly out of the window, and the more she tried to concentrate, the less she seemed able. She sighed in frustration, and wondered how Quinn was doing. She turned around in her seat to see Quinn staring guiltily at her, with a slightly red nose. Quinn's hands had quickly retreated under the desk. Rachel frowned, wondering what Quinn was hiding, but couldn't ask as the blonde was seated too far away and she couldn't very well talk over the teacher. That wouldn't do at all. She continued to fix Quinn with a withering glare, but Quinn just grinned back sheepishly. Rachel turned back to the front of the class, and stifled a yawn. Why was she so tired suddenly? She shook her head and blinked rapidly, trying to wake herself up. She forced herself to concentrate.

It was working, for a while. Rachel was listening now, and seemed able to focus enough to start taking notes again, and when the teacher was asking questions her hand was stretched as high in the air as it could go (not very high at all). It was the third time that she raised her hand that something dreadful happened.

There was a tickle in her throat. Her hand whipped through the air and slapped on the desk loudly. She swallowed, but the tickle was still there. The urge to cough, of all things, was rapidly rising. A cold sweat broke out on the palms of her hands. Oh no, she thought desperately. Oh no. Her hand flew to her throat, and she gritted her teeth, determined not to give in. To actually cough was to show the first sign of weakness, and then it would really happen. She would get sick. And she did not want that.

Rachel Berry was on a mission (big surprise). After the terrible incident in English with the tickle in the back of her throat she had been applying a rigorous routine of multi-vitamin pills and several mugs of herbal tea a day. She had also been going to bed earlier, to try and counter the tiredness – plus, she figured that maybe going to bed at ten thirty every night really was very late anyway, and it was good she was changing it to nine thirty instead – and her morning workout on the elliptical had been extended by an extra two-point-five minutes as it would be no good to let any form of illness take away her absolutely necessary exercise. This did mean, of course, that her very carefully sculpted usual routine had been turned entirely upside down, causing a lot of stress and rearrangement, but she was willing to sacrifice her time if it meant she would fend off the cough.

Hey daily MySpace videos were lacking a little, Rachel felt. But it was necessary. This was her least favourite of the sacrifices, because who knows when a talent scout would happen upon her MySpace page and see her for the stunning, young ingénue that she was, watch her videos and go "Oh, well, they're going downhill. I won't bother with her then". Rachel had actually suffered several nightmares along those lines, which seemed to only be making her more tired, and her singing more strained. She found herself afraid to really try anything big, in case she damaged her voice, but Rachel Berry had a very big voice despite the very small body and it did not like to be neglected. It was also doing nothing for her ego.

It was time to do some detective work. She needed to find out why she was feeling like this. She figured that she was beginning to get sick because her body was too tired to fight off an illness, so she had to investigate why she was so tired. Nothing had changed recently that she could think of... So she looked deeper.

Then it struck her. She was running through her scaled in glee club, when she noticed that she seemed louder than usual. But she wasn't singing louder, and she was fairly sure – considering she had her ears examined by a doctor routinely, to make sure she wasn't going deaf and bring an early end to her career before it could even take off – that it wasn't her ears playing up. So that meant that people weren't singing. They weren't bothering to even sing, in glee club. That was the whole point of it! Rachel was mortified. As great as she was –and she was great, she knew that – she couldn't take the strain on top of all of other very busy activities. There was only so much one diva could do. Action definitely needed to be taken.

Zizes thundered down the stairs towards Rachel and fixed her with a calculatingly bored look. Rachel gulped. She was probably only a quarter of the size of the other girl, and if she was to fall, she would definitely be crushed. Don't show fear. Never show any fear, Rachel prompted herself.

"I need you to bug the choir room," Rachel said matter-of-factly. Never mind formalities such as 'hello' or 'how are you?' This was serious, and it was time to cut to the chase. Not that Lauren could chase all that well, come to think of it.

"Bug the choir room?" Lauren looked offended. She stated that that was, in fact, the case. "I'm almost offended by the simplicity of the request," Rachel was annoyed now. Hand on her hip, she glared up at the only girl in school who seemed to have a fashion sense worse than herself. How come she never got slushied?

"Just tell me you can do it, Zizes," She looked conspiratorially around her, "the microphones would have to be hidden." A student was ascending the stairs. Rachel didn't think anything of it, but apparently when being asked about secret spying missions, Lauren was easily spooked.

"Who's this guy? Who's this guy?" 'This guy' looked utterly baffled, and passed at a slightly faster rate than he had begun with. Rachel watched him, equally confused. As soon as he had passed, although he was clearly not out of ear-shot yet, Lauren continued.

"It'll cost you two bucks, a mallow marsh for me and Snickers bars for my workers. Take it or leave it, Berry." Rachel pretended to consider. It wasn't a hard choice. She nodded firmly.

Overall, 'Operation Barbra Streisand' has been a success. Apart from Lauren really not understanding the art of 'subtlety' (she had blatantly stood at the choir room door patiently chomping her way through her workers' Snickers bars as glee club ran through the scaled and the craftily planted microphone recorded the whole session from the mobile suspended on the ceiling), anyway. And Rachel had thought the name of the operation was bad enough –just because she liked (okay adored) Streisand didn't mean she was incapable of being original, but Lauren had insisted. Rachel was now set with her studio quality headphones clutched to her head as she listened to her running through her scales. They had recorded all of that week's rehearsals, and it was a tedious job to do when she had far better things to be doing with her evenings than listening to herself sing – as much as she liked the sound of her own voice – but really, it did sound as though it was mainly her.

She thanked God that she was pitch perfect with her hearing, and could thusly pick out each individual members' voice, or rather in this case, pick out whose voice wasn't there. She pulled her notepad towards her, her favourite notepad with 'From the desk of Rachel Berry' complete with a little star, because the star with her signature was a metaphor for the future star she was to become, and metaphors were important. The list read as follows:

From the desk of

Rachel Berry

1) Finn Hudson

2) Quinn Fabray

3) Santana Lopez

4) Noah Puckerman

5) Brittany

Ever the perfectionist, Rachel was most upset when she realised that she didn't know what Brittany's last name was, and when she asked around she found out that nobody knew. The list looked wrong when it had everyone's first and last names apart from her.

What upset her more, however, was the fact that her current romantic interest was on the list, too. Not Finn Hudson this time, thankfully, but of course; Quinn. She couldn't understand why Quinn had stopped singing. She was always telling Rachel how much she loved glee, that it was the one place she could feel safe and at home, but evidently this wasn't true if she wasn't even bothering to participate anymore. Rachel narrowed her eyes at the list. She would have to have a discussion with Quinn about this pretty sharp.

Rachel slammed several pots of pills down on the piano in front of Mr. Schuester.

"Um... W-what are these?"

"My vitamin supplements. I'm taking them three times a day." She continued to very seriously set them out on the piano. Mr. Schuester looked frightened, but that wasn't a surprise as that was the expression he usually wore in the company of Rachel Berry.

"I'm exhausted," Rachel continued, seemingly oblivious to the teacher's feelings, "I even felt a tickle in the back of my throat and I never get sick."

"I-I just don't understand why you're so tired all of a sudden..."

"Because every song I sing in here is a solo! As you know I have perfect pitch which means I have a sensitive ear. None of them were singing. So I had a little talk with Lauren Zizes, President of the AV Club," at the mention of the name, Mr. Schuester physically recoiled. He had met with the girl several times, and was possibly even scarier than Rachel herself. The two of them together as a team would mean hell on earth.

"Here are the glee club members who are not pulling their weight," She brandished a piece of paper and pushed it towards the stricken man. His eyes narrowed as he read the list.

"This is half the glee club," Rachel looked up at the man, imploring him to do something right for once.