Happy holidays everyone, I hope you're doing well! It's a bit hard for me to post every week because of my new job, but I'll try to do it anyway. Thanks for your reviews, as always, don't hesitate to tell me your thoughts.


April came way too soon, the beginning of the warm days with it, and Quinn noted with feelings torn between bitterness and joy that it had been more than seven months that Rachel lived in here. She felt like she had just met her the day before, but also like she had always known her, as if she had been an old friend who came on holiday in the region.

It didn't matter, in fact, as long as Rachel was here.

She now only went out into the building hallway, every two or three days, to get her mail and gaze at the paved street, only to check that no patrol or soldier took a particular interest in this building.

Her nerves were each time put a bit more at ease when she only saw simple passersby again and again, without stopping more than a few seconds, and Quinn sighed in relief because it meant that the Jew hidden in her apartment still had some respite.

She hoped that this respite would soon transform into an unconditional and complete freedom, the most precious good she could get.

The young woman only needed a few minutes to go down the wooden staircases, to take the letters in her mailbox, and to go back upstairs. She was flipping through them carelessly when an envelope caught her attention, and she couldn't stop grinning when she saw a neat writing without flourish that she knew too well.

Quinn opened the letter once settled on the couch. A small card was in it, which made her smile grow bigger when she read it.

On the front was a simple "Happy Birthday" written in black ink, impersonal, while on the back, the older one of the Fabray sisters had wrote about ten lines in which she reassured the young Parisian, assured that she was in good health and careful, congratulated her for her birthday, and also told her her wish to come back soon in France, to join her and have her normal life back, away from the army's orders, pirate radios, rebellious acts and endless sabotages.

As soon as the war would end.

Quinn sighed while gazing absently at the white envelope. She missed Frannie. Another one of the consequences of this absurd war. She was hundreds, even thousands of kilometers away, and couldn't come back home yet.

It was at this moment, as Quinn was lost in her thoughts that made her mentally insult all of those blatant injustices that were giving rhythm to her life, that Rachel came out of the kitchen to sit next to her, her eyes drawn by the letter between her hands, the one that had caught her attention for the last ten minutes.

"Bad news ?" she said hesitantly when she saw the blonde's lost look.

Quinn gave her a small smile while shaking her head. "My sister wrote me."

As she didn't add anything, Rachel got nearer and asked her: "Is she alright ?"

"Oh. Yes. It's just that... I don't know when she will be back home." She shrugged sadly. "I'd like it if she didn't have to work so far away, even if it's for a good cause. I think that I'll be more relieved if she was closer, and not in a foreign country from which she sends me a letter every six months."

Quinn stopped, sighed, then took Rachel's hand that was resting on her knees. She gave her a resigned smile, before adding that she would have liked to have at least a way to contact her; the lack of communication was terribly unpleasant.

"I'm sure that she'll be back soon," the brunette said, squeezing her hand, "I'm certain of it. The war cannot go on indefinitely."

Silence. Quinn didn't answer for long seconds that seemed like an eternity. Finally, she spoke up.

"Perhaps it can. Maybe the war can go on for a long time. The forces of Liberation are maybe not as powerful nor as numerous as they seem to be. Who knows? We could need Frannie's help for weeks, months, or even years. Until an armistice will be signed, or until the war is definitely lost."

"Don't think about that, Quinn."

Quinn shrugged again, letting out a long sigh. "I just fear that something will happen to her."

Rachel understood where her fears were coming from. All the more so as Quinn's sister had willingly chosen to leave, to participate in this war without being forced to — or being mentally forced, probably — and if something serious happened to her, it would be another injustice to hit her.

Because soldiers were dying every day, sent to the front, and families were slaughtered and pulled apart every day too, simply because they found themselves at the wrong place in the wrong time, while Frannie didn't have anything to do with those massacres; yet she had decided to stand up for her country and to resist, without asking for anything back.

All those thoughts were making her sick.

She clung a little more to Quinn, resting her chin on her shoulder and kissing the skin of her neck.

"Don't worry about her," she said softly. "She'll be back soon. Don't think about what could happen to her."

The blonde made a small vague noise in response, letting herself be soothed by the soap smell coming from Rachel and feeling her hair caressing her collarbone. Rachel was right. There was no point in thinking about the worse. Closing her eyes, Quinn thought about what could have happened to Rachel before she met her, about what the war had made her suffer during all those years spent clandestinely, crossing borders and hopping in trains, hoping that no firing squad was waiting for her at the end.

She was pulled out of her inner ramblings when she felt Rachel lift her head, then the barely perceptible touch of the brunette's fingers on her clavicle, just under the fabric of her dress covering her shoulder.

"What's that ?" she heard her ask in a slightly confused voice.

In a blink, Quinn knew what she was talking about. Looking down only confirmed her apprehensions.

Rachel's thin, bony fingers were brushing the barely visible scar under the material of her dress, not daring to do more than a superficial examination of the wound with the tips of her fingers. Pale and sinuous, it sneaked in under the fabric, disappeared so only the smallest part was apparent. Without realizing it, Quinn had grabbed Rachel's hand before placing it on her lap, diverting it from this whitish sensitive patch of skin. The brunette gave her a questioning, tender look, with the same question in her eyes.

There was no way for her to elude the question; she didn't want to, anyway.

"It is better to tell you everything from the beginning," Quinn said with a slight smile.

"Probably," the shorter girl responded.

The blonde smiled, and despite the dread that tormented her vocal cords and her stomach, she didn't doubt for an instant Rachel's trust in her.

"For you to understand, I first have to talk to you about my family," she began, feeling a vague nostalgia overwhelming her as she searched through her memories. "We lived in a small village to the east of Paris, my mother, my father, Frannie and I. My father made the Great war just before I was born. He had been called up on the front as a nurse. He got through it unharmed, and since then he took care of us while continuing his job as a doctor. My mom... I don't really know what her job was. Couturier, maybe, or washerwoman. A lot of odd jobs that enabled her to feed us when we were young. I learned later that she had informed the French espionage or counter-espionage agencies during the war. It's probably thanks to her that we had had a roof above our head and our plates full most of the time."

"I spent wonderful years back there. I think that I could have lived there all my life if I hadn't been forced to leave. One day — it was in 1935 or in 1936, while Frannie and I were coming back from school —, everything changed in a split second, when we caught sight of our house. It was a bit away from the center of the village, you know? So very few people passed by our house, and we had to walk a lot to go to school. Still, what I meant was that when we got closer, we saw that the door was open."

"I thought about it this famous day when I got back from the laundry and you weren't there." Quinn visibly struggled against the tears, then she drew a long breath to catch back the train of her thoughts. "Frannie and I took fright, naturally. We got nearer, slowly, fearing that an invisible assailant would come out of the house and catch us, but there was no one. Absolutely no one. My dad's office was in one of the rooms in the back, and he didn't go out much, like my mom; so not seeing a single soul gave us a shock. But that wasn't the only thing that was strange. Everywhere, sheets of paper were scattered on the floor, on the furniture, inside the tiniest interstices. The chairs and the trinkets had been knocked over, only very few of them were still in one piece. It was as if a storm had passed through every room. I still remember how I felt all the oxygen leaving my lungs."

"We couldn't understand what had happened, but we had an idea about it. Straight away I knew that something bad should have happened when I saw Frannie's look. She seemed devastated, at the same time ready to cry and to yell at the entire world. And yet, she didn't tell me what she already knew this day. That's one of the advantages of being the eldest child, I suppose," Quinn said while shrugging. "She understood things better than me. She has always been the smartest one. I remember that she took me to one of our neighbors, one friend of my parents that had a son the same age as Frannie. He was the one who told us the latest news."

"He had been alerted in the afternoon when he heard engine noises, which pushed him into coming near the window to see what was happening. Little people had a car, back then, and even less in a small village in which you could walk from an edge to another in twenty minutes. He had seen three or four cars stopped in front of our house, then men who looked not very easy-going coming out of them. Some of them had guns. He had wanted to warn somebody, but who? Five minutes later and they were coming out of our home, escorting my parents, and they started their cars and never came back. That's all."

"He never knew who those people were. Me neither. But according to him, and according to Frannie and some documents that we found when we were cleaning the house, it is possible that those men were from a counterespionage agency. Probably Germans, since my mother had been sent to Germany after the end of the Great war to gather information for the French government and the secret service. I haven't told you, but she was perfectly bilingual because she had an Alsatian mother. Those men also could have been from the Gestapo. It doesn't really matter to me, ultimately. All that I knew, and all that I know today, is that those men took my parents from me, without them being able to say goodbye to us. It's..."

The young woman stopped abruptly, visibly looking for words that she couldn't find, before gazing down at her hand, linked with Rachel's. She looked at it for a long moment, starting a slow back and forth movement with her thumb on the dark-haired girl's knuckles, then she sighed. She plunged her green eyes into the brunette's kind ones.

"The following days, I tried to kill myself. Hence the scar."

Silence met her declaration.

Quinn didn't explain how. Rachel didn't ask. Quinn then thought that she could quickly get used to recount the stories of her childhood, even the most difficult ones, to the small Jew, only to watch her listen to her attentively, wide-eyed, hung on her lips and drinking her words without cutting her off, without judging her.

Quinn was struck by this last point. Rachel didn't judge her. She wasn't sure that she would have done the same if she had been in her place. And yet, the brunette was letting her talk, without doing anything but smile or squeeze her hand to comfort her, with her tranquil presence but not in the least superfluous.

"Fran saved my life," she went on once she was certain that her nerves weren't going to abandon her one more time. "She took care of me during the following weeks. We still lived in this house, since we had nowhere to go. I thought that it would continue for a long time, but our salvation was much closer than we expected. Two months had barely passed and a stranger was knocking at our door, and she took us with her to go to Paris — I'm hardly exaggerating. A woman that we had never seen before suddenly introduced herself, proclaiming to be a vague cousin of our family, and she wanted us to follow her to the capital city? It was hard to believe. Frannie was very suspicious, but after we gave it some time to think about it, we agreed on the fact that we couldn't go on living like that. Especially as a house like ours was hard to maintain for a barely adult woman and a teenager."

"You can guess what happened next. This woman was Sue Sylvester. She turned out to truly be a cousin of mom and because she hadn't heard from her for weeks, she had wanted to visit her to check if everything was alright. She was aware of mom's unofficial business. Obviously, she figured out what should have happened when she only found my sister and me, the only resident of the house. She offered us to come to Paris, where she could take care of us and of the most... practical aspects of our life. It is thanks to her if I didn't starve to death. She gave us money, she rent this apartment, without asking for anything in return. Sue had been more than a distant aunt taking two orphans in after a disaster; she has been the parent we missed, who had been taken from us too soon."

Quinn stopped, breathing deeply and smiling wistfully while thinking about everything that Sue had done for them when nothing bound her to do so. Rachel's voice, full of tenderness, was finally heard, almost whispered, as if she was afraid to disturb the silence.

"Do you know what happened to your parents ?"

"We never knew," she said with a slight shrug. "I don't know if they're in jail, or if they had been tortured, or even if they're dead. I don't know if they are in France or at the other side of the world, if they had been forced to work for the Gestapo, for Germany or another state. I have no idea about the treatment to spies. I just hope... It may seem naive, coming from me, and probably unrealistic to even think about it, but I hope that one day I'll find them. I will run into them in the street, or they will send me a letter saying they're finally free, or Frannie would have tracked them and we could finally see them again."

Rachel smiled. Optimism was paradoxically welcome in these times.

She squeezed Quinn's hand with hers, then she leaned to kiss her shoulder, her collarbone, moving aside the strap of her dress to touch the pale scar with the tip of her lips, just enough to hear the blonde inspire strongly at her contact.

"Make me think that I have to thank this famous Sue when I'll finally meet her," she said while resting her head in her neck. "I, at least, owe her that."

"She will respond that she only did her duty," Quinn chuckled.

The young brunette giggled, but soon collected herself and she was once again calm and serious. Quinn must have felt it, because she slipped her arm around her waist, drawing her a bit closer to her body, before asking Rachel if everything was alright.

"Yes," she answered right away. "Don't worry. It's just that... I was thinking." She didn't add anything, so the blonde affectionately squeezed her waist to encourage her to continue.

"I already thought about it — about killing myself. Many times." Upon seeing the look on Quinn's face, she promptly added: "Oh, no, I don't think about it anymore, if that's what you're wondering. I'll never have the strength to do it. It's just that sometimes when I was on the run and I had to leave my shelter to find another one, and walk kilometers to avoid the Gestapo, or take the train clandestinely until my next destination... I thought about it, a few times. I've been on the roads for long years. I had lived humid and unbearable summers, and winters soaked to the bone. I often wondered why I was doing all of this. Why was I fleeing, why was I running, when the only possible outcome would have been death."

Rachel then shook her head against the blonde's shoulder.

"But I didn't do anything. I didn't have the strength. Perhaps because I still had a slight hope onto which I held, and maybe this hope prevented me from doing something irrevocable. I'm glad I did hold onto it," she sighed; then she lifted her head to watch the gray eyes studded with green that fascinated her so much. "Because this hope allowed me to meet you."

Quinn didn't respond, but she instead wondered how could a woman, a young girl as innocent and irreproachable and naive as Rachel, have gone through so many horrors.

She didn't know the quarter of what Rachel had lived through, but she knew that she had seen much more atrocities than she did. Quinn wondered briefly what would her life have been if the small Jew had been caught by those nazi monsters, by a collaborator a bit too talkative, and if she hadn't taken her in.

The blonde shook her head to avoid herself those endless reflections leading to a dead end.

"I'm happy that you're here," Quinn finished while softly smiling.


Quinn unveiled her past to Rachel a bit more every day — or rather every night, because it was during these moments bathed in darkness and deafening silence that it was easier for her to open up.

She talked to her about Frannie, much more since she got her letter, and about their precious link. As far as she could remember, it had always been this way. Frannie and Quinn hadn't been much pulled apart during their childhood, and Quinn had thought that it would have been this way all their lives.

She told her that, even if they were four years apart, they had been closer than anyone, being in turns sisters, friends, and confidantes, then parents when they lost theirs.

At the request of Rachel, she also told her her happiest memories, talked to her about her parents and her hometown, where she had lived until she was seventeen. The little Jew, for her part, was content with listening to her, rarely speaking but to make a remark from time to time.

Quinn knew that it was hard for Rachel to broach the subject of her own family. She had only made slight references to her childhood in Austria with her parents. The blonde didn't take offense, nonetheless; she would wait as long as she had to until Rachel would feel capable of telling her about her uncommon past. And even if this time never came, she would make sure that the dark-haired girl could always count on her.

She had also modified some of her habits and, every night, instead of occupying the couch for a few lonely hours, she would slip into her bed, a book in her hand, glasses on her nose, and she would read until the brunette joined her to snuggle against her and keep her warm. Quinn would read aloud passages of one of her novels, murmur her love through poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the muted atmosphere of her bedroom, and fall asleep hugging her body.

It soon became a ritual that the two women impatiently waited for.

Everything seemed to finally find its place, unlike the first days of her cohabitation with Rachel when every gesture was hesitant, every word well thought out and cautious before saying it.

One day, Quinn dared to hope for this agreement to last, that Rachel could stay at her sides even after the war was over.

However, they couldn't do anything about the unexpected event that disrupted them one evening.

During the night of the twenty-first April, the two occupants of the apartment awoke with a start, with the displeasing sensation that they had been literally shaken awake. They didn't have the time to ask the slightest question, because soon another quake shook the building, making the floor vibrate.

Quinn felt Rachel shuddering, and she reacted in a second by wrapping her arms around her, seated against the headboard.

She reached across to light the bedside lamp, but the switch only clicked and the bulb didn't light up. She couldn't see what time was it on the wall clock either. Upon glancing through the window, the young woman couldn't see anything unusual, only a few lampposts were weakly lighting up the street, too feebly for her to notice a single thing.

Quinn wasn't reassured in the least — neither was Rachel, judging by the tremors going through the young woman. Before she could think about what to do, the room was yet again the victim of another jolt, weaker than the previous ones, but it seemed to never end. In the humming racket, Quinn thought she could detect the zooming noises of aircraft engines.

The idea of going out of her apartment to ask for help or information on what was happening seemed all of a sudden less appealing. At this instant, only Rachel mattered, and her safety.

The words that Quinn had meant to pronounce to soothe the young woman got stuck in her throat when she realized that she had no way to know if everything was going to be alright. She swallowed her words at the same time as a few tears, listening to the distant echoes of the bangs of the detonations of the bombs, her stomach in knots.

A wave of panic brutally took her. And, as she hugged against her a woman as clueless as she was about what was happening outside, she thought with despair and despondency that the Luftwaffe had named Paris the next city to wreck.

The night seemed painfully long.


I'm always making a comeback, but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

— Billie Holiday.