Hey everyone! So sorry for the delay but school has been school lately so you know how it goes. Thank you all for your unwavering patience. I tried to make it up by making this chapter a long one. I'm thinking two more chapters to go after this one which is both exciting and just a little bit sad. I'll try to keep the wait time a little shorter for the next one! Thanks again.


Chapter 52 – Catch What's Falling Down

The two adults still on the ground freeze at the sight of the tiny girl pointing a gun at the man who had ruined her life.

Rachel stands above him, her eyes narrowed, her stance firm. The distance between the muzzle of the gun and Andrew's head is no more than two or three feet. While Rachel has never actually fired a gun and isn't so sure about the quality of her aim, she still at least knows how to take the shot if she needs to and she is confident that she would not miss.

She does not rush into anything. The fire is starting to lick its way up the skeleton of Brittany's car. It engulfs the vehicle and hollows it from the inside out. The light from it is glowing off of Rachel's determined face. The heat is suffocating but Rachel doesn't even seem to notice. Instead, she absorbs the idea of having power over this man for the first time in her entire life. She wants to take it all in. The young girl is calm as can be despite her current situation. The only thing that she is not certain about is which experience is more satisfying: holding that gun up to Andrew's head or the look on his face when he watches her do it.

Sue rolls off of Andrew's body, out of Rachel's line of fire. Rachel barely even takes notice. She is fixated on Andrew, who at least has the sense to move more slowly.

He pulls himself up into a seated position. He is cradling his broken arm tight against his abdomen and using the other to hold himself upright. His eyes are unfocused. He looks like he is struggling through the pain, struggling through the failure, struggling to figure out how all of his hard work and careful execution had ended this way.

"Rachel baby, what are you doing?" He looks Rachel in the eyes and actually has the audacity to sound betrayed.

Rachel doesn't respond. She has been dreaming of this moment since the very first day that she realized that Andrew's treatment of her would grow with her, would mold inside of her DNA like a disease and change her internal makeup forever. Andrew was used to being able to charm and talk his way out of a lot of blame. Rachel was not going to let that happen tonight.

When a person loses something as fundamental as what Rachel had lost, there was nothing left to be given. Emotionally, Rachel feels invincible. She has already lost her father, her sister, and her childhood. What was losing that last piece of herself by pulling the trigger going to do to her now? It seems inconsequential and without the fear of consequences, all that was left was revenge.

Her muddled, brown eyes are placid. They're as still as a body of water on a windless day. Here, she didn't have to live inside of his world. Here, she was only in her own. Andrew's violence, his mind games, his desperate need to control every aspect of her life wouldn't work. Here, she is the one on top.

Brittany stares at the girl, wondering how she had let her slip out of her sight and into this mess. She thought that she had been helping. She had stopped Andrew from getting away with Rachel tonight, so why couldn't she have stopped it from ending like this?

The blonde girl is fully expecting for Rachel to fire that gun. Brittany's body is tense, anticipating the sound of the shot. She can see it in Rachel's eyes. The younger girl is picturing Andrew, his shirt billowing as she fires a brand-new, full magazine's worth of bullets straight into his chest.

Through the reflection of the fire, Brittany can see the images dance inside of Rachel's face. She is imagining a red wind blowing through the torn holes in the fabric. She pictures him dancing hazily like a broken marionette for a couple of seconds before he falls to the ground. She pictures that terrible, monstrous look on his face disappearing into a permanent emptiness…

Behind Rachel, flashing lights are starting to funnel their way up the block towards them. Brittany watches as what looks like an entire brigade of emergency vehicles appears from beyond the tree line. The Lima Police Department must have called for backup from every town within ten miles.

The vehicles jump the curb, turning carefully onto the golf course. They drive much more conservatively than Brittany had coming down this exact path, following the light from the fire.

"Rachel, I know that what he did to you was awful, but you don't want to do this," Sue whispers quietly to the girl, taking a couple of cautious steps closer, trying to talk her down from reacting emotionally. "The police are here. They're right behind you. They are going to take care of Andrew. They are going to give him what he deserves. This does not have to be on you. Just put the gun down."

"Put the gun down, Rachel," Andrew parrotts from his position on the floor. She is the one pointing the gun at him and still, he holds derision in his voice towards her. His greatest fault has always lied in his refusal to see Rachel as anything more than inferior. He had underestimated her abilities before and he was doing it again because he had no idea how to respond when the person that he is trying to control decides to fight back.

"You have to ignore him, Rachel," Sue tells her. Her voice is growing desperate because she can sense Rachel's body beginning to tremble, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed. Sue knows that Rachel's emotional threshold is rapidly being approached. She has maybe seconds to act before that potential energy erupts into abrupt reactions.

Sue presses herself as close into Rachel as she is comfortable with. She does not trust that she will convince Rachel not to shoot enough to step in between Andrew and the gun, but she does hover over the younger girl's shoulder, trying desperately to be the voice of reason that she needs.

"You know what I can do to you, Rachel," Andrew tells her. His voice has grown as dark as the night that is surrounding them. "You know what happens when you don't listen to me."

Sue fights desperately to suppress her gag reflex. Where Rachel might only hear Andrew's threat, Sue senses a desperation in his tone. He is fighting to regain control, resorting to tactics that had worked to wedge himself inside of the Corcoran's lives so well six months ago. He doesn't know how much Rachel has grown since, and although Sue can see the girl fighting with her deeply ingrained desire to listen to his direction and avoid the worse of his anger, she is still standing her ground and for that, Sue is proud.

"Why don't you ever listen to me, Rachel?" he asks her. He looks remorseful but Sue knows that he is full of crap. This is just another way of Andrew trying to get inside of Rachel's head. "Why do you always make things so hard on yourself?"

"You need to stop talking right now." Sue warns the man coolly. She had been so shocked by the power of his manipulation, the paralyzing force of his words that she had let him address Rachel longer than what she'd intended on. Sue doesn't know how Rachel managed to survive being in that man's presence for so long on her own. She has been standing in front of him for less than five minutes and already, he was making it very difficult for her to keep trying to convince Rachel not to kill him.

Andrew sneers at the woman. When he does, his mouth is toothless and bloody. It looks like a scene straight out of a horror movie. Sue ignores it as best as she can and turns back to the desperate young girl in front of her, whose body is shaking so hard by now that even if she doesn't pull the trigger on purpose, she may very well do so by accident.

"He's not going to touch you, Rachel," Sue promises. "He would have to get through me first to do it and if I can kill an Alaskan grizzly with nothing but my own two hands and a pen cap, then I can keep Andrew away from you, too."

"She's lied to you before, Rachel," Andrew calls over her shoulder. Sue grits her teeth, finding herself resisting the urge to grab the gun from Rachel and shoot Andrew herself. "They all have. Now, drop that gun and come with me and I might even decide to go easy on you tonight."

"He's right," Rachel trembles. Her voice is choked, the prequel to a sob. When Sue looks at her, she notices that a couple of tears have started to leak out from underneath her eyes. "They'll just let him go again. He'll keep coming back. He's never going to leave me alone."

The coach feels like her heart is being pulled out of her chest, which is a foreign feeling for the woman rumored to be so heartless. Rachel sounds like a child, not the adult that Sue had watched her get forced into growing into. The lack of trust that the young girl holds is astounding, although Sue cannot say that she blames her. Look where trusting has gotten her.

"That's not true," Coach Sylvester shakes her head. "Rachel, I'm sorry for what you had to go through in the past but I can promise, after what happened tonight, Andrew is going to be going away for a long, long time. He is going to be locked up and you best believe that if they ever even think about letting him out, let it be in five, twenty, or fifty years, you will have me sitting in on each and every hearing delivering strong words against the matter."

The coach forces a smirk, trying to impart her obscure sense of humor to try to put Rachel at ease, but the young girl doesn't even seem to notice. Tears are streaming down her cheeks by now. The most miraculous thing is that despite the fact that the rest of her body is shaking, the hand that is holding onto the gun remains steady.

"If you put that gun down, Rachel, you will be able to spend the rest of your life knowing that you rose above him." A sense of urgency creeps into Sue's negotiations as the police descend closer and closer. "If you put that gun down, you win. If you shoot him, you are going to lose a piece of yourself that you will never be able to get back."

"I've already lost everything," Rachel sobs. The noise is like a throbbing bass line, the kind that pulses and rattles a human being from the inside out. It makes the cheerleading coach almost physically ill to hear that much pain inside of one person's voice, especially somebody so young.

"That's not true," Sue shakes her head. Rachel's eyes flash rapidly between Andrew and the cheerleading coach, shooting uncertain glances. Her face is completely white and her eyes red. Her shoulders are down from all of the weight that she is carrying on them, that she has been carrying on them. Even Brittany can sense the pressure from her distance. The look is familiar. Brittany had watched Santana wear that same tortured stance a million times before as well. She has watched Santana bear that back-breaking weight, and now she watches Rachel do it too.

Brittany realizes that Andrew had chosen the Corcoran family because he thought that they were weak; easy targets. He never expected all three of them to turn that around and evolve that weakness into a strength that he could not match.

"It is," Rachel gasps. The police are so close now that the red and blue lights from their cars are bouncing off of the agony in Rachel's face.

Andrew watches the police close in nervously. He had failed to manipulate Rachel and now knows that he will have to change personas drastically in order to get the police back onto his side. The three women surrounding him watch as his face transforms. He tries and struggles to swallow the overwhelming anger from failing to get Rachel to submit to him in order to get ready to put on his next show. In a sense, Rachel wonders if the attraction that her mother had ever felt towards Andrew has anything to do with the fact that in their own way, they are both fantastic actors.

He is trying to pull himself to his feet, but he is struggling. He gasps in pain and only makes it as far as his knees. His broken arm is throbbing from the pull of gravity. He hunches forward and uses his good arm to brace himself. He takes a couple of deep breaths in preparation and finally manages to sit up straight against his knees. Rachel takes a shaky step away from him. Despite all of Sue's effort, her grip on the gun only stiffens.

"This is it, Rachel," the man warns her, trying his hardest to cut the pain out of his voice. "If you walk away with me right now, then maybe I will make it so you'll be feeling good enough to walk out of bed on your own accord within the week."

"You haven't lost everything, Rachel," Sue emphasizes hard, trying to drown out Andrew's threat. She holds out her hand, begging Rachel to pass the gun to her before the girl can do something stupid in front of what feels like every single police officer in Ohio. But Rachel does not seem to see them. She doesn't seem to see anything but Andrew.

Her entire demeanor changes when he is around. In it has crept a sense of desperation. It is taking over the more sophisticated parts of her mind, shutting down all rational thought. Because of this, instead of listening to Sue and handing the pistol over to her, she only grips it tighter even though she knows that everything that the woman is saying makes sense.

"I hate him," Rachel admits. She whispers it, so low that Sue can barely hear her and the woman realizes that Rachel is talking this way because she is still afraid of what Andrew might do to her if he hears it.

The younger girl is glaring at Andrew but she is focused on Sue and the coach can tell that when she says that she hates Andrew, she not only means it, but she is terrified by it.

Sue looks at the girl hard. Rachel's teeth are grit. Her finger is wrapped tight around the trigger of the pistol and she looks overwhelmed by the sense that the slightest twitch of a muscle is all that she needs to end Andrew once and for all.

"I know that you hate him Rachel. You have every right to hate him. But you're a tough girl. You have taken this experience and you have used it to make yourself stronger. I know that it hasn't been easy but you are handling it with a dignity and a strength that Andrew will never know. Don't throw all of that away after everything that you have worked for, Rachel. It's not worth it."

Rachel's eyes flash across Sue's again. The cheerleading coach sees a look inside of Rachel's eyes that tells her that maybe Sue is actually getting across to her. Rachel's arm drops ever-so slightly. Sue is just thinking that they had dodged the bullet quite literally when the emergency vehicles start to circle all around them and almost immediately, Rachel tenses up all over again.

The police form a semi-circle around the group, the cars blocking them in like a cell door. Behind them, a row of ambulances wait to treat the casualties of the evening and a fire truck stalls, deciding that dousing the flames that had surrounded Brittany's car is not worth getting caught up in a possible cross-fire.

Spotlights click on in succession, drowning the small group in a flood of light like they were on the red carpet. There are no sirens. Instead, the group only hears the sounds of car doors opening and officers scrambling into position. They bend low behind open car doors for protection. What feels like a thousand guns are drawn at once. Through the spotlights, the three girls and Andrew cannot make out a single face. The officer's rifles are the most distinct part about them.

"Drop the gun!" one of them screams. His voice echoes angrily. He must be speaking into some kind of bullhorn or PA system or something. His voice is strong, naturally loud. It carries across the golf course, bounces off of the trees, and hits them a second time from behind.

"Don't shoot!" Sue demands. She thrusts her hands into the air and steps sharply in front of Rachel, who looks frozen in place. There is a hurried clicking as the officers take aim at Sue. The woman braces for a shot but when she doesn't hear one, she swallows against her remarkably dry tongue and pushes through, her voice hurried and desperate. "These girls have been kidnapped. They subdued their attacker. Rachel is acting in self-defense. I saw the entire thing. She is a scared fifteen-year-old girl. Do not shoot her!"

"She needs to drop her weapon," the officer with the voice that sounds like it is coming out of the sky repeats. He doesn't seem to have heard a word that Sue said and while the cheerleading coach knows that she has a lot of power within the walls of William McKinley High School, she is not foolish enough to think that she holds the same amount of clout when it comes to the Allen County Sheriff Department's SWAT unit.

"She's been through a lot tonight, she's in shock. Please, give me a minute to talk to her!" Sue remains standing in the center of aim of all of the rifles, waiting for her permission. Her arms are spread wide, half trying to convince the officer not to shoot and half trying to protect Rachel and Brittany just in case they decided not to listen.

"Rachel, this is over," Sue whispers over her shoulder towards the trembling brunette. There is a sense of urgency in the coach's voice that does not help to calm the young, terrified teenager standing behind her. The uncertainty in Rachel's face has grown overwhelming.

She thinks about what Sue had just told the police officers, about her being in shock. It felt like a strange word to use.A shock would indicate that she had not seen this coming and sure, while she hadn't anticipated Andrew's reemergence in her life to be so extreme, she wasn't so much in shock that it had happened as much as she was that it hadn't happened sooner.

Then there were the police. There were a hundred of them right in front of her, all aiming their guns at her instead of Andrew. Was she shocked that they would do nothing to stop him? Not particularly. They had never been able to stop him before. It was starting to seem like the only thing that would stop Andrew was the gun that she was currently holding.

How physically easy it was to cock her finger back and pull the trigger. So why was she having such a hard time doing it?

While Rachel is debating this question inside of her head, a single person breaks through the ranks of officers and emergency vehicles. Rachel watches through her peripherals as he approaches the small group slowly with his hands raised in the air. The lights from the cars are so bright that the person looks like nothing more than a shadow until he is almost face-to-face with Sue.

He moves slowly as to not startle anybody and drops his eyes at the cheerleading coach in an effort to indicate that he is not a threat. He is in a police uniform, but he doesn't wear the same full protective gear that most of his coworkers have on. He does have a gun, but it is tucked safely away inside of its holster, untouched. Instead, in his hands he holds a cellphone which Rachel can tell through her fleeting glances is connected on a line with somebody.

"Rachel, right?" the man asks the girl softly. Rachel looks at him again, this time her eyes lingering so she can take in more of the man who already seems to know her somehow.

The light bounces off the man's face as clearly as if it were the middle of the day. His eyes are a shimmering blue and dripping with concern. Rachel recognizes him immediately. She has never met him before, but she had met his son only a couple of hours ago sitting on a couch at a high school party, flanked by two Cheerios. That felt like a lifetime ago.

This man and his son have the exact same face. The only tell-tale differences that Rachel can distinguish between the two of them is that his features are slightly older and his hair, which is a duller shade of golden is cropped into a crew cut as opposed to his son's long, curly locks.

Rachel swallows, but nods at this man anyway, confirming her identity. He takes advantage of her responsiveness immediately, using it as an excuse to take a step closer towards her.

"My name is Jon," he introduces himself. Hell, he had even passed his name down to his son. "I'm the Allen County Sheriff. I'm here to help you, Rachel."

Rachel chokes at his words. Her grip on the pistol tightens. Around her, she senses every person around her tense in response and she finds it both amazing and terrifying that such a small move can have such a profound effect.

"You can't help me," she chokes. She is too deep in this now. Her fear is gripping at her, pulling her deeper and deeper into this black hole. In her head, there is only one way out of this.

"I can," the man promises. "I can help you right now. You have done nothing wrong, Rachel. You acted in self-defense. You subdued an attacker. You and your friend here acted very bravely tonight. You may have even saved each other's lives, but we are here now. We are here to help you. I need you to trust us to finish this."

"Rachel baby, listen to him," Andrew interjects from his position on the ground. The tone that he takes with Rachel now that the police are present is like night and day. The last time that he had addressed her, it had been to threaten her. Now that he recognizes that he is trapped like a wild animal, his course changes abruptly. "Tell the officer that this is all just a big mistake. Put the gun down, Rachel."

Rachel chokes up. Somehow, his gentleness hurts even more than his threats had. She watches him fight through his injuries and pretend to care about her and her stomach drops like a rock. His eyes are sincere even though she knows that his heart is not, and Rachel's terror grows because she knows that this is his secret weapon. This is how he wins. He knows exactly how to play somebody based on their role in society. He knows exactly how to get away with things.

Her grip on the gun tightens. He is asking her to stop, but she can't because he never stopped whenever she had asked him to. He never left her alone just because she begged, pleaded, and cried. For some reason, listening to him bargain with her only makes Rachel want to hurt him more, even though in some far away corner of her mind she recognizes that this makes her no better than him.

Deep down, Rachel knows that this is not a decision that is up to her. She hadn't been raised particularly religious, but what she did take away from the month or so that her parents had experimented with Catholic school for her and Santana was that it is not her decision to decide how somebody lives or dies or anything else that happens in between. Still, her brain is spinning from everything that has happened tonight and she knows that she should at least have the luxury of making a suggestion.

Death did not deserve to happen to good people; Rachel knew that. It didn't deserve to happen to people like her father or to Santana, but it did deserve to happen to the really bad ones. It deserved to happen to him.

"Rachel, listen to him," the officer suggests and a sob breaks out from the back of Rachel's throat because Andrew already has him wrapped around his finger. He has already won. "You need to put the gun down."

"You'll just let him go again," Rachel sniffles. She is trying desperately not to cry. She is in a position where it does not fit to appear pathetic, but she just cannot help it. "You always let him go."

The man pauses, nodding at Rachel sympathetically, taking another tentative step closer.

"I know that you have been hurt by this process before Rachel," he admits, talking low so that only Rachel can hear him. "And I'm sorry that you had to go through everything that you did. I know that it's not fair, and I know that I'm asking a lot of you when I ask for your trust, but he is not getting away this time and as long as you do not pull that trigger, you win. I can help you right now, Rachel, but only if you put down that gun."

Rachel finds herself taking deep, heaving breaths as the torment of her confusion overwhelms her. Her brain is screaming at her from every direction. Its primitive, emergency response systems are ringing like alarm bells in her head, begging her to listen to reason. Still, for some strange reason, the rest of her body does not seem to want to cooperate and her fingers only continue to hold its grip on the gun.

"Officer, please go easy on her," Andrew says, his voice dripping with fake pity. "Rachel has problems at home. Her mother and her sister are very disturbed and Rachel unfortunately is having a hard time letting go of how she was raised. She was going to come live with me to start fresh, but she is understandably emotional about leaving her family. She loves them despite everything they've done to her. We had an accident, obviously. She is hurt and she's frazzled, but this has clearly been a huge misunderstanding. Tell him, Rachel. Tell him the truth."

Rachel's mouth goes dry. Andrew has such a profound control over her that the words are halfway out of her mouth before she is cut off.

"Officer, everything that he is telling you is a lie." Sue has heard enough. She steps in quickly to intervene, trying to stop Andrew before things can get even more out of control. She speaks fast and pointedly. The need to get Rachel away from Andrew quickly is prominent inside of her voice. "This man has been terrorizing Rachel and her family for months. He held these girls against her will tonight. He shot Rachel's sister and kidnapped both her and Brittany here. He has a history of extreme violence and at no point did she go with him willingly."

The officer pauses. He looks frustrated by all of the interference when the focus should be on Rachel right now.

"I suggest that you both stop talking," he says, narrowing his eyes at the two adults before taking another cautious step towards Rachel, trying to slow the pace of the night. He turns to the girl, placing all of his attention onto her. When he speaks to her, his voice is soft, understanding, helpful.

"Rachel, I know that you've been through a lot tonight. I know that you've been through a lot these last couple of months but listen, I have somebody on the phone who really wants to talk to you. Somebody who can help you."

His words tug on Rachel's natural curiosity. The girl turns to look at him, looking down at the cell phone that he is still clutching inside of his hands.

"W-who?" Rachel stutters. She wonders if it is a hostage negotiator, or one of those other experts that they always show on television talking down violent criminals. Is that what she is now? A violent criminal? Or maybe it was her shrink. That woman was always good at getting inside of Rachel's head, even when Rachel didn't want her head analyzed. There is only one person in the world who Rachel wants to talk to and that is Santana. Of course, that is impossible now.

"Your mother."

The girl's eyebrows fall slack as the rest of her face scrunches, trying desperately not to cry. She may want to talk to Santana the most, but her mother is a close second.

Rachel tries not to look surprised. She has no idea how her mother has done it. The woman had just watched one daughter get gunned down and the other stolen out of her own home. Rachel remembers how her mother had been after her father had died: despondent, unreachable. Somehow, this time she was managing to push through the veil of grief that shrouded her so easily and wedge herself in the middle of this chaotic crime scene.

"She's very worried about you, Rachel," the man continues when Rachel just stares at him. "We've been able to give her a few updates throughout the night, but she wants to talk to you. She wants to hear that you're okay from you."

Rachel feels the grip that she holds on the gun slacken slightly as she nods her head at the police officer, indicating quietly that she wants to talk to her mother.

"Officer, you have got to be kidding me right now," Andrew argues. His charm falters as the officer refuses to cooperate with his story. Having the woman that he is trying to peg as being insane just on the other side of the phone would not corroborate his account of the evening and he knows that he cannot afford that. "Her mother is what got us all into this mess in the first place. The woman is unstable. She's not even in Lima. She left her kids alone. She doesn't care about Rachel, not like I do."

"You just keep sitting there and keep your mouth shut," the officer warns him. His voice is harsh and unsympathetic. It makes Rachel's heart flutter with a little bit of hope because maybe Andrew isn't so convincing after all.

"If I was the one holding the gun, you would have shot me by now," he mutters. He falls back down onto his backside, his injuries no longer allowing him to sit upright on his knees. Rachel wonders if it is really the pain that is making him waiver. She is suspicious that it has more to do with the fact that he is faltering in an area where he normally excels. He has worked himself into a corner and has never had to work so hard to get himself out of trouble before.

"If you don't stop talking then it's not me shooting you that you will have to worry about."

The officer's eyes continue to narrow. Rachel turns to him, surprised. Were police officers allowed to say that to people, even if the person in question is Andrew?

It is clear that this man is able to see what no other authority figure was ever able to whenever Andrew was around. He is seeing the man's true character and is hyper-cautious with the understanding that Rachel is not only wielding a gun but an understandable vendetta. Rachel locks eyes with the police officer and she immediately understands that he can read everything that he has to work against; that nagging voice in the back of Rachel's head that is insisting that Andrew will not leave her alone until he is dead.

Rachel understands the logic behind everybody trying to convince her to put the gun down, it's just that when it comes to Andrew, her veil for trust is too paper thin. The officer knows this. He knows that it is not just a matter of trying to convince Rachel to drop the gun. He has to convince her that he can get Andrew away from her permanently and that was the hard part; especially when the man sitting in front of her would not stop taunting her so arrogantly.

Andrew shrinks back in response to the sheriff's words. Satisfied, the officer puts a finger up to Rachel, indicating for her to wait as he lifts his phone up to his ear.

"Mrs. Corcoran?" he asks and Rachel feels her chest tighten in anticipation. "Listen, I have Rachel here with me right now. She wants to talk to you."

There is another pause, this time louder. Through the distance and all of the chaos, Rachel cannot hear what her mother is saying on the other line, but she can imagine the words and the terror inside of them as she struggles to find a way to connect with her last remaining daughter. Rachel wonders if her mother even knows about Santana yet and then remembers that she had seen everything through the house's security cameras.

"Yes, Rachel is fine, Mrs. Corcoran," the man speaks again. He is wearing a specific tone, the but lingering heavily inside of every word. Rachel recognizes that he has a lot of options to help fill in that but. She imagines him saying things like yes, Rachel is fine but her friend had to crash her car in order to help her escape and the giant ball of fire that it has turned into is starting to get closer and your daughter won't put down the gun long enough to allow the fire department through. Or yes, Rachel is fine but her sister is dead. Or the most obvious: yes, Rachel is fine but we need you to convince her not to kill her tormenter.

"Rachel?" the officer pulls the girl out of her thoughts. When she looks up at him, she notices that not only did that but never come, he has also taken the opportunity to advance close enough to her to pass his phone along to her. He holds it out to her as Rachel looks up at him timidly. His eyes look sincere, concerned. She swallows and tries to find comfort in the fact that he is clearly not trying to save Andrew's life as much as he is trying to save hers. He doesn't want to see her do anything stupid. He wants her to walk away from all of this just as badly as the rest of them did.

Taking a deep breath, Rachel takes the phone from his hand and holds it up to her ear.

"Mom?" she asks, and she cannot help the way that her voice shakes when she says it. The sheriff had told her mother that she was fine, but Rachel finds that her body is suddenly throbbing with pain as it gets used to the rush of adrenaline that has carried her this far. Her emotions are gathering so wildly that her head feels like it is about to explode, and she is feeling everything when she wishes that she could just turn it all off and feel nothing at all.

"Oh Rachel, thank God. I was so worried." Her mother breathes a powerful sigh of relief. Her breath sounds as hard as a hurricane-force wind and for a moment, Rachel pretends that she can feel it blowing against her cheek if only to imagine that she was standing right here next to her as opposed to being two hundred miles away.

For a moment, the only thing that her mother can do is pant heavily and profess over and over again to a higher-being that she doesn't even believe in her thanks for keeping Rachel alive for this long. Rachel tries to stay strong. She knows that with her father gone and now Santana gone as well, Rachel is all that her mother has left.

"Talk to me Rachel, are you okay?" her mother asks quickly as soon as she finds the means to produce full sentences again. Her voice is tight, fast, and devastated. She is looking for every detail inside of a single breath and frankly, Rachel doesn't think that she has the energy to produce those at the moment.

"I'm fine," is all Rachel manages, but there is a deadness inside of her tone and it is quite obvious to Shelby - even from over the phone - that her daughter is far from fine.

"Did he hurt you?" Shelby pushes. She is so caught up in the logistics of how Andrew had managed to hurt her daughters this time that she cannot focus on the biggest threat that he imparts on Rachel even still: the way that he is able to get inside of her head and make her question everything that she has ever known, including the fine line between murder and self-defense.

"I'm a little banged up, but I'm okay," Rachel answers impassively.

"Okay, Rachel I need you to listen to me very carefully, alright? I've been talking to Jon, he has been keeping me updated about what's going on, okay? I need you to trust him. Listen to him. He is there to help you. He is not going to let Andrew get away. I need you to give him that gun. Let the police take care of Andrew and let the paramedics take care of you and Brittany. I am working on getting home as fast as I can. I'm going to meet you guys at the hospital in a couple of hours but please, I need you to trust Jon until I get there, okay?"

Rachel hesitates. Her mother's words are shaking as her emotions and urgency start to overwhelm her. It is hardly putting Rachel at ease. She is already feeling overwhelmed enough.

Rachel looks back towards Andrew, who is watching her struggle with her own conscience. She watches as the brazenness slowly creeps back into his face the longer that she goes without shooting him. His face is still bleeding, but he is wearing that familiar smirk again, that victorious look and somehow, remarkably, Rachel can tell that he still thinks that he is going to come out of this on top.

"Listen to mommy, Rachel," he teases and when Rachel only continues to tense, the grin spreads across his face even further.

"You shut up," the sheriff interferes, pointing towards Andrew hard in an effort to intimidate him into silence.

Sensing their leader tensing, the remaining team of officers behind them reacts. Rachel can hear the commotion as they start to choke up on their weapons, screaming for updates, asking for orders to shoot, ready to fire should they be given the signal.

Her mother must have heard the outbreak of chaos, because Rachel can hear her breath speed up on the other side of the line.

"Ignore him, Rachel. Ignore them. I need you to concentrate on me. Focus on me Rachel, please." Shelby is begging Rachel to break through the thick cloud that has engulfed her brain. The mother knows that she is the only one who can pull Rachel out of it because it is from her that Rachel inherited it. "I know that things are crazy over there. I know that you're feeling scared and overwhelmed, but I'm here with you now. Ignore them. Just listen to me."

Rachel squeezes her eyes shut, trying to ease the pounding inside of her head. She is breathing heavily and the background noises are starting to gather inside of her chest and push out any room that had been left for air. That familiar feeling of panic is back and the entire Earth is spinning much faster than she remembers it doing before. She is starting to grow dizzy and is afraid that she will drop the gun where Andrew would likely be able to pick it up and kill her before a single police officer even knows what is happening.

"Can you hear me, Rachel?" her mother is sensing that she is starting to lose her. The woman's voice sounds distant through the phone as Rachel's vision starts to fold in on her. "Are you still with me?"

She's not. Rachel knows that if she were, she would be able to answer her mother. She would be able to listen to everyone around her and put the gun down.

Rachel swallows, struggling to breathe. Her mother pauses, or maybe Rachel has just stopped hearing her. Everything around her sucks inward to the size of a pinpoint; a singularity right before a massive explosion. Then, somehow through the phone she hears her mother push out a single deep, shuddering breath. She senses a gentleness as the woman tries to coax her daughter back to life, back to concentration, back from doing something she could never take back.

Shelby breathes one more time and the next thing that Rachel knows, she hears something that she had not heard in a long, long time and she realizes that her mother is singing to her.

"No one here to guide you. Now you're on your own. Only me beside you. Still, you're not alone. No one is alone. Truly. No one is alone."

The first thing that Rachel notices is the way that her mother's voice cracks when she sings. Mostly, she notices it because Shelby Corcoran's voice is never anything less than perfect. She, like her daughter thrived on letting her emotions project beautifully inside of her voice. But this… this was too much.

"Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Others may deceive you, you decide what's good. You decide alone. But no one is alone."

Rachel takes deep breaths, trying to concentrate solely on her mother's voice. She uses the beat of it to concentrate on the pattern of oxygen as it floods into her nose and out of her mouth.

For all of the fanfare about how close her mother had gotten to Broadway fame, Rachel seldom heard the woman sing with the exception of special occasions and old video tapes. She had heard enough to understand the scope of the talent that her mother harbored, but the woman had given up singing when she decided to give up Broadway. It was a hobby that was too painful for her to continue with. She didn't want to remember what she almost had, but Shelby hates that it had taken something like this for her to realize that there are so much more she had to lose.

"People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes holding to their own, thinking they're alone."

Shelby's youngest daughter has always had an obsessive fascination with her mother's experience in theater. She has been her mother's biggest fan since the day that she was born and at the time, Shelby had not been able to see that Rachel didn't care that she had tried and failed, she only saw everything that she had done.

It took Shelby years to realize that there had been a girl, much like Rachel, who once lived inside of herself. But then, she had blinked too quickly and failure had trapped her into a hole she struggled to claw her way out of. Instead of being curious about life, Shelby only became suspicious of anybody who lived as long as she had and still threw caution to the wind.

"Honor their mistakes. Everybody makes one another's terrible mistakes. Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what's right. You decide what's good. Just remember."

Rachel had an excitement about her that the girl had managed to hold onto for a long time. Shelby could remember watching Rachel's classmates digress and lose interest with age while Rachel only propelled herself forward. She never worried about Rachel. Her youngest kept a youthful spunk about her up until the day that Shelby herself had brought Andrew into their home and it killed the mother that it was her own fault that her daughter had lost all interest in life.

She knew that she should have tried harder to stop her daughter from growing up to be just like her. She could only hope that there was still time.

"Someone is on your side. Someone else is not. While we're seeing our side. Maybe we forgot. They are not alone. Cause no one is alone."

Ironically, her husband had been the one who always sang to the girls. He had a terrible voice, but he loved to listen to Shelby rehearse for auditions and he had fallen in love with her go-to audition song; a classic rendition of No One is Alone by Bernadette Peters. He didn't like the song as much as he missed Shelby singing it when she'd stopped, but despite his lack of talent, he didn't want his daughters to miss anything about their mother and so it quickly became the song that he shared with the girls whom he held so close.

Rachel doesn't pretend not to know that she was a hard child. Even as a young girl, she was the type of kid who had to know everything, but was overwhelmed by detail. She held stress on her shoulders like someone quadruple her age. On her progress reports from school, teachers would note that while she was a bright girl, she was easily frustrated and overly sensitive. Her emotions were often taken out on her classmates and because of that, she struggled to make and maintain friendships.

When she would come home from school on particularly bad days, her father would always be waiting for her and somehow, he would already know what happened. He would also know just what to do. He would sing to Rachel, her favorite song, put her in her favorite pajamas, and the two of them would eat ice cream before dinner until Santana came home and demanded a piece of her father's affection that Rachel wanted reserved just for her.

In their house, their father was the emotional stronghold. He was his daughters' go-to. It was simply a job that their mother could not excel in and after a while, she didn't even bother to try anymore. She let him do all of the support work and then one day, overnight, he was gone and there was nobody. Initially, Rachel had latched onto Santana, but she had done so without realizing that Santana needed a person for herself just as much as Rachel did.

It had taken a long time, but Rachel is finally starting to sense her mother tapping into the sensitive nature that had always been inside of her somewhere. It was simply hiding. But finally, just like her father before, her mother somehow knows just what Rachel needs to hear before even Rachel does.

"Hard to see the light now. Just don't let it go. Things will come out right now. We can make it so. Someone is on your side. No one is alone."

Rachel takes a deep breath and closes her eyes as her mother's voice fades into silence. When she opens her eyes again, all of the noises and calamity from the outside seems to disappear.

"Are you still with me honey?" Shelby whispers to her after an extended silence. There is a guilt inside of her mother's voice, almost a desperation for Rachel to tell her that she had done the right thing. Shelby knows that there had been an extended period of time where she had all but disappeared entirely from her children's lives. She knew that her kids had merely existed and grown older around her while she missed everything in between. She knew that if she couldn't save Rachel here today, then her failures would come full circle and her remaining days would be empty with no end in sight.

Rachel thinks about her answer. She knows that physically, her and her mother remain far apart. Emotionally, however, they seem to be the only two people on Earth existing on the same plane.

"I'm here," Rachel hiccups and she can literally hear the relief on her mother's breath.

"You okay?" she asks her daughter sadly. Rachel nods, but then remembers that her mother can't see her over the phone.

"I will be," she forces herself to answer.

"Deep breaths, okay? You're a strong girl. You are going to make it through this and we are going to be together again soon, but you have to listen to me very carefully for right now. That police officer standing next to you right now cares very much about you and he is on personal orders from me to make sure that you are alright and that you stay that way. I need you to give him the gun. I need you to listen to him. You have so much to keep fighting for, Rachel. You have a mom who is worried sick about you. You have friends who just followed you to the ends of the Earth to make sure that you stayed safe. You have Santana-"

"Santana's dead," Rachel chokes, cutting her mother off with a sound that physically rips through her chest. She releases a sob at the memory, one that irritates her sore and swollen throat, but she knows that that pain is nothing in comparison to the emptiness that she is feeling from losing Santana.

"Santana is not dead, Rachel," her mother corrects her quickly. Her voice is gentle. It contrasts horribly with the way that Rachel is crying and shaking.

The girl sucks in a breath. There is a slight pause, a hesitation almost out of disbelieve. Rachel is terrified to let the hope reignite for fear that it will only be extinguished once more. The forked tongue of her grief is whispering one thing in one ear – to trust her mother – and a completely other thing in the other, that her mother is only saying this to get her to put down the gun.

"How do you know?" Rachel hiccups, begging for an elaboration. Despite her continued hesitation, she feels the gun falter inside of her hands as the muzzle points down away from Andrew's head and into the mud.

"I have been on the phone with the police since they got to our house," Shelby explains. "Santana lost a lot of blood, but she was with Quinn and Quinn knows a lot of good first aid. She took good care of Santana, Rachel. The ambulance took both of them to the hospital about ten minutes ago. Santana is okay and Quinn is okay. Now, I need to know that you're going to be okay too."

Rachel hesitates, overwhelmed by her competing emotions.

"Rachel…" her mother breathes slowly when Rachel only continues to sniffle into the phone in response. "I know this is hard. I know that these last couple of months, all you have known is trouble so you think that that's all that you have in store for you, but it's not going to be like that anymore. You fought until the bitter end and just so long as you put that gun down, you win."

Rachel squeezes her eyes closed. Trouble, that seemed like a strange word to Rachel. Her father used to always tell her that trouble was like the sky; it follows us around everywhere and it can be blue or it can be gray but what we did with that information was entirely up to us.

Opening her eyes, Rachel looks up towards the sky, which has turned into a strange, hazy purple color thanks to the smoke from the smoldering remains of Brittany's car. She didn't know what that meant exactly, but she has to interpret it somehow.

Rachel hates how hard it is for her to see a world without Andrew in it. She hates that she is more like Andrew now than she is like herself. Her inability to put the gun down proves that.

She glares at the man. She is staring at him and he in turn, is watching her back. He looks speculative, curious, predatory. The more that Rachel seems to relax, the tenser that he seems to get.

He looks desperate. He is completely out of ideas. He had spent months weaving his way inside of Rachel's head and the fact that her mother was here, ready to pull her right back out is infuriating him.

"Are you still there, Rachel?" she hears her mother ask. The woman is whispering. Rachel doesn't understand why. Maybe because she has been staring at Andrew for so long that her mother probably thought she'd hung up on her.

"I'm still here," she nods, but then remembers that her mother is on the phone and she can't see her. Her stomach sinks. She is tired of this. She has wasted enough time and energy on Andrew, she is not going to waste anymore. She feels her muscles relax before her brain even truly processes that this is over. Her arm drops to her side, the gun pointing straight down at the ground. "The gun is down."

Her mother releases a breath that Rachel doesn't think she even realized she has been holding.

"Good girl," Shelby praises. She doesn't bother trying to hide how relieved she is that Rachel had decided not to shoot Andrew. "I'm proud of you honey."

"You did the right thing, Rachel," the sheriff interjects, putting a hand on Rachel's shoulder. Rachel shudders, not at the touch but by the sense of finality in all of this. She watches as Andrew rolls over onto his back. He is out of energy to fight back, he is out of energy to even try. The look of him is that of pure defeat. "Now, I'm going to need you to give me that gun."

The sheriff holds his hand out so that Rachel can hand over her weapon. The girl swallows against her dry mouth and tries to form a sentence, but the words scramble and twist in a knot inside of her throat. Now that she is not so hyper-focused on Andrew, she becomes aware of everything: the smell of smoke in the air, the pain in her ribs and her neck and her head and everywhere else, the sheer amount of people that are circled all around them…

Her knees are starting to feel weak. She has every intention of handing the gun over, but suddenly, she can't seem to find the energy to raise her arm. She can't even find the energy to so much as keep her grip on the gun.

She feels her fingers start to loosen devoid of her control. The gun slips out from in between them and plummets to the Earth, hitting the grass with a sound like a bass drum.

Rachel's eyes sink, watching the trajectory of the weapon. She realizes her mistake only after it has already happened. Rolled onto his side and out of options, Andrew's regard for personal preservation has disintegrated. Rachel watches his eyes follow the motion of the gun greedily and can literally see his last resort plan formulating inside of his eyes.

He lunges for the gun that Rachel had just unwittingly put right within his reach. His face is so red that it is almost purple. Rachel can tell that he is in pain, but he seems determined to succeed in at least some aspect of his plan tonight.

Rachel jumps when she sees him and Andrew notices. Their eyes meet fleetingly. For a split second, the entire world disappears and it is only the two of them here, facing off.

That split second of eye contact lasts for hours. In that moment, neither move and then, just as suddenly, they both leap at the same moment, each one trying to exact the other.

The sudden movement startles everybody. Rachel can literally feel the alarms ringing as the rest of the world tries to catch up to what she has already noticed.

Through her peripherals, Rachel watches the sheriff reach for his gun, still tucked safely inside of its holster, but Rachel knows that by the time he draws it and fires, it would already be too late. The only person who can stop Andrew now is her.

In a split-second decision, Rachel pushes forward, boxing out the space between Andrew and the gun. She rears her foot backwards and realizes in this fleeting instance that she doesn't need a gun in order to get a shot in tonight.

With an angry swell of emotion, she powers her foot forward with the force of every single feeling that she has ever felt towards this man. The top of her foot connects hard with his jaw. She hears the satisfying crack that Andrew's head makes when bone connects with bone and watches in a satisfied daze as his body flies away from the gun like a ragdoll.

A splatter of blood flies out from in between his lips. Andrew doesn't even seem to know what hit him as he falls onto his back, arms spread-eagle, unconscious.

Rachel's bad ankle screams at her in protest and when she lands back down on it hard, it finally gives way to the pressure. She feels her entire leg swell desperately and throb before collapsing. Gravity takes her and she feels her body plummet to the ground. She is fully expecting to hit it too until somebody catches her underneath her armpits at the very last moment.

Rachel feels the cell phone that she had been holding slip out of her grip. She had completely forgotten about the lifeline that had been connecting her and her mother until now that that connection has been broken.

Her body collapses into the chest of the person who had caught her. She sinks into the fleshy truss and looks up to find the blonde hair and concerned blue eyes of Sue Sylvester staring back down at her.

The world feels distant. Rachel can hear all of the commotion around her, but it sounds completely engulfed like it has been sucked into a fog.

"Stay with me, Corcoran," the cheerleading coach demands. The woman sounds frightened. Rachel triest to tell her that she is fine, but the words don't seem to want to come out.

She feels bad, recognizing that this is the second Corcoran that Sue has had to try to convince not to die tonight. Of course, Rachel, unlike Santana, was far from death's door, but her eyes are wide and dilated and her voice stuck inside of the center of her throat and Sue has had enough scares tonight to already be on edge as it is.

The paramedics circle in rapidly per Sue's beckoning. Rachel watches them form a wall between her and Andrew, blocking him from view. The gun that had been by her side a moment ago is gone, and Rachel realizes that one of the police officers must have grabbed it to remove any more possibilities of a threat.

A group of faces hovers above Rachel, blocking her view of the sky. She doesn't recognize a single one of them and finds herself burrowing even further into Sue's body in a desperate attempt to latch onto something familiar.

All of their features seem to meld together. Clouded by smoke, the only thing that Rachel sees is black; black uniforms, black shadows, black mouths that don't smile and black eyes that look at her only with concern. Nobody seems to be breathing. Instead, they're all just staring, waiting for her to make the first move.

The fire feels hotter down here, which Rachel thinks is strange because she thought that heat was supposed to rise. She takes short, shallow breaths, trying to cool her body off and keep from sucking in too much smoke. Straining her neck, she searches for another glimpse of the sky. It seems to have disappeared around the swell of bodies and Rachel knows that if she can just catch a little piece of it, then it will ease that sense of claustrophobia that is telling her to just get it over with and pass out already.

"Give her space," she hears Sue demand angrily. There is a fierce protective tone in her voice as she hisses at the paramedics, daring them to defy her. Rachel feels Sue's arms wrap tighter around her shoulders and wonders if the cheerleading coach even knows that she is doing it. "Give her room to breathe, dammit!"

The paramedics glance at each other hesitantly, but step backwards despite this. They open the circle back up for the night to stream through. Rachel feels the rush of fresh air rush into her lungs and relax her almost instantaneously.

"I'm fine," she finally manages. She tries to push off of Sue as though to prove a point, but the coach only holds on tighter.

"You're not fine," Sue insists. She waves the paramedics forward once more. This time, only two of them approach.

From somewhere behind her, Andrew's voice filters through the air once more and Rachel tenses inside of Sue's arms.

He sounds groggy and disoriented, very unlike himself despite the fact that Rachel could never mistake that voice.

It starts off as an unintelligible groan but gradually collects steam. There is a scuffle and more people flood towards him, trying to hold him down. He is still putting up a fight. Rachel should have known he would.

When he starts to scream at first Rachel thinks that it must be from the pain. She catches a fleeting glimpse of him and watches paramedics struggle to fit a cervical collar around his neck. A couple of police officers are holding down his shoulders and legs. One has a knee pressed tight into his chest trying to stop him from thrashing. It is only when the words become clearer that Rachel realizes that he is not screaming out of pain, but he is still trying to profess his innocence.

"Let's get her away from him," she hears one of the paramedics whisper to his partner when she is caught staring for a little too long. Rachel can tell that she was not meant to hear it and while she does not appreciate the paramedic's failed attempt at tact, she does appreciate the opportunity to finally get away from Andrew.

The night grass is moist underneath her and her head is a constellation of confusion that the sky over her head can't hold a candle to. Still, when a couple pairs of hands reach down to try and pull her to her feet, Rachel pushes them away.

"I can do it myself," she insists. She fights against the help, putting pressure down against her feet in an effort to propel herself up. Her bad ankle screams at her, like the kick that she had delivered to Andrew earlier had been the thing to put it over the edge entirely.

Rachel falls back down onto her backside with a groan that expresses more frustration than it does pain.

"Take it easy, Rachel," she feels a gentle hand rest in between her shoulder blades, keeping her down should she dare make another attempt at mobility. The voice is floating down a long tunnel, but her eyes remain focused as she sees Sue hovering above her, looking down at her with concern.

"Are you sure that she's okay?" Sue turns to ask one of the many uniformed paramedics.

"She's been through a lot," one of them answers, the voice distant. "It's not abnormal."

Rachel would like to ask him what part of any of this he would qualify as being normal to begin with but she bites her tongue.

"Rachel, stop being stubborn and let them help you," Sue demands. She sounds out of patience and Rachel remembers that she has sacrificed and risked too much to watch Rachel refuse help now.

With a huff, Rachel crosses her arms. Her face tells those around her all they need to know about how she feels about all of this fanfare, but she manages to let the paramedics wrap their arms underneath her armpits and hoist her to her feet anyway. They act like a pair of crutches on either side of her, allowing Rachel to place all of her body weight against her good ankle. The bad one hovers uselessly behind her. Gravity tugs it downwards painfully and she can feel the rush of blood go down to the appendage and make it throb.

She hops slowly towards the waiting ambulances, eyes turning over her shoulder periodically just to make sure that Sue is still following her and Andrew isn't. She can still hear him shouting after her. She closes her eyes and tries to ignore him. Sensing the need to interfere, Sue presses a comforting hand in between her shoulder blades and urges her forward.

Rachel is deposited into the back of one of the many awaiting ambulances. They sit her down against the stretcher where she is able to put her foot up. She tries not to show the relief that it brings to the throbbing when she does.

Rachel breathes carefully in through her nose and out through her mouth, trying to concentrate on that as somebody wraps a blood pressure cuff around her upper arm and another presses two fingers into her wrist, checking her pulse. A blinding pin of light shines inside of her eyes without warning. She squints and squeezes her eyes closed but when she does, she still sees the ring from the light behind her eyelids, glowing like a new star.

"I'm staying with her!"

She hears the familiar voice from a slight distance and her eyes snap open. Each one of the paramedics currently fussing over her pauses temporarily, distracted by the commotion. What now? Their eyes seem to read.

Rachel looks out of the open back doors just in time to watch Brittany fight against two paramedics who are trying to guide her into another ambulance.

Rachel can see why they might be concerned. The blonde is bleeding profusely from a cut on her forehead that looks deep enough to require stitches. Brittany however, does not seem to want any part of it.

"Brittany…" It is Sue again, and she sounds exasperated. It cannot be an easy job, Rachel thinks, trying to wrangle together two girls who are frightened and clingy and have become strangely dependent on each other in the last hour. "You two can meet back up at the hospital."

"Put me in the same ambulance," Brittany demands, and she puts a look on her face that mirrors Sue to the exact.

The paramedic eases backwards, not wanting to get in the middle of this. He doesn't say anything, but steps away from the open doors of the ambulance, creating a space for Brittany to climb inside.

Brittany pushes through the paramedics as if they weren't even there. She squats in front of Rachel, looking her right in the eyes. Blood is glistening down the side of her face, drying and stuck in dark clumps to her skin. She looks almost savage. Somehow, this makes Rachel smile.

"Are you okay?" the blonde girl asks Rachel seriously. Despite being the girlfriend of Rachel's sister, the two of them have rarely spoke outside of casual conversation. Her concern and semblance of protection towards Rachel wraps tight around the girl's heart and she starts to think that maybe Andrew did have a point when he told Brittany that Santana was starting to rub off on her.

"I'm fine," Rachel insists, cringing as her eyes slide up to glance at the cut on Brittany's forehead, which looks deep and painful. "Are you okay?"

The blonde offers her a gentle smile and nods. "I'm fine."

She takes a seat on the edge of the stretcher besides Rachel, sitting as close to her as possible as one of the paramedics starts to press gauze pads into Brittany's forehead for her.

"Charlie?" a voice calls into the ambulance, addressing the paramedic working on Brittany.

Rachel looks up. The sheriff from earlier is standing at the foot of the ambulance, peering inside at the two girls and busy paramedics.

"I was wondering if I could speak with the girls for a moment?" he asks.

"They're being treated," the paramedic insists. He sounds annoyed by the constant distractions, but the sheriff doesn't budge.

"This will only take a second," he insists.

The paramedics pause and glance at each other. They do not look happy about the arrangement, about constantly being kept from doing their jobs, but see no way out of it. Instead, they each wrap a thick, wool blanket around both Brittany and Rachel's shoulders, wanting to leave them with at least something before they climb out of the back of the ambulance in order to give the girls and the sheriff some privacy.

Rachel pulls the blanket further up her shoulders, feeling a sudden chill that reaches straight down into her bones. She watches as the sheriff takes his time, quietly thanking the paramedics before climbing into the back of the ambulance.

Taking a seat against the bench across from the girls, he pulls a small notepad out of his breast pocket and flashes it to the girls before flipping it open to an empty page.

"I have to make it look like I'm asking you questions," he smiles softly. Rachel and Brittany both notice that he hasn't even bothered taking out anything to write with. "We have a lot of eager young officers trying to bombard you. I figure I'd spare you."

"You're not here to ask us questions?" Rachel asks. The tired girl does not even bother trying to hide her relief.

"That can wait," he nods gently at Rachel in confirmation.

"Then what are you doing here?" Brittany asks, getting immediately defensive again.

"Just checking in," the man insists. He smiles at the girls, but when neither one of them reciprocate, his face falls once more.

He takes a deep breath, leaning forward until his elbows rest against his knees.

"You girls were both pretty brave tonight," he tells them, and then shakes his head through a strained laugh. "Crazy, but brave. We could use more people like you on our team once you're old enough."

"My dad was a firefighter," Rachel hears herself say before she can stop herself. She hadn't meant to reveal any intimate details about her life, but there was something about this man sitting before her that eased the words right out of her. He reminded Rachel of her father, actually and besides, the girl feels that she owes this man something in return for everything that he had done for her tonight."

"He taught you well," the sheriff nods respectfully. "It would be a good job for someone like you."

"I'm going to be on Broadway," Rachel informs him matter-of-factly and then pauses the second that the words are out of her mouth. The sense of normalcy of her claim does not seem to fit in with any of her current surroundings. Only she can find a way to talk about Broadway while sitting in the back of an ambulance…

"I like a girl with ambition," the sheriff tells her with a small smile that Rachel returns and holds onto for a moment.

"Do you know what happened to my mom?" she asks suddenly. She does not mean to turn the conversation so abruptly, but there is concern bubbling in her stomach that the cell phone connected with her mother was still sitting in the damp grass of the putting green where Rachel had dropped it, and that the only thing that Shelby could hear anymore was chaos with no answers being it. She had put her mother through so much already, there was no need to prolong the torture.

"I just hung up the phone with her," the man tells her gently, easing Rachel's fears slightly. "She's renting a car and driving from Chicago. It might take a couple of hours but she's on her way. She's going to meet you and your sister at the hospital."

"So, Santana is okay?" Rachel asks cautiously, perking at the mention of her sister. "And Quinn?"

"I know that they were both taken to the hospital," he tells her, his face tipping, regretful that he cannot give Rachel any more than this. "I know that the last I heard, they were both holding on tight."

Rachel nods her head and falls into silence with the understanding that he doesn't have any more to give her; that he, like her, has been stuck here in the dark.

The man is staring at her sympathetically, waiting for her to absorb all of this information. There is a genuine concern in his face as he looks at her with piercing eyes so pale that it is almost as if she is staring straight into his mind. Rachel wonders what he is thinking about. She imagines that he is looking at Rachel and is only picturing his own family, trying to figure out how he would react had this been his own child.

"You have a son, right?" Rachel asks before she can stop herself, thinking that she shouldn't be the only one here dishing out personal information about her life.

"You know Jonathan?" he asks her. He looks surprised.

"We just met tonight actually," Rachel tells him and blushes the moment the man raises a suspicious eyebrow at her. "I mean… I don't want to get him into trouble or anything, we just crossed paths at a party tonight… I mean… a get-together of sorts. He's a good kid. He's something else for sure, but he's a good kid."

The man laughs as Rachel stumbles over her guilt.

"He certainly is something else," the man reciprocates and rather than getting the impression that he is angry that Rachel had just admitted to seeing his son at a party, Rachel instead only sees a semblance of pride that he had made a good impression on a girl who was so hesitant to trust. "Thanks Rachel, I'll relay the message to him."

Rachel smirks at him appreciatively, but then thinks of something else.

"Can I ask you something else?" she asks.

"Sure," he nods patiently.

"How did you get a hold of my mother?"

At this, the sheriff actually laughs and this time, it's a real, hearty one.

"It was your mother that got a hold of us, actually," he tells Rachel. "She's a very persistent woman. I can tell that she cares about you and your sister very much. I think that I'm starting to see where you get it from." He raises an eyebrow at Rachel, who blushes deeply. "Like I said, she will meet you at the hospital in a couple of hours but I am afraid that I have delayed your trip long enough."

Rachel's face falls. "I'm fine," she insists, crossing her arms stubbornly across her chest.

The man raises a skeptical eyebrow. Pausing, Rachel watches as he flips the blank front sheet of his notepad over one onto a page that actually does have writing on it.

"That's funny, because the paramedics out there mentioned something to me about head, neck, and rib injuries and a busted up ankle that they want to get looked at."

Rachel feels the back of her neck burn red.

"It's nothing," she mutters, but her voice seems to have lost most of its confidence.

"You're going."

The voice resonates from outside of the ambulance. When Rachel turns her head forward, she sees Sue standing at the entranceway. Her back is turned towards Rachel but it is clear that she has been standing a vigilant guard over the ambulance the entire time and has been listening to every word exchanged between her and the sheriff.

Rachel can't really say that she blames Sue. She had gotten the impression that the coach felt a sense of responsibility for what happened tonight, even if Rachel and Santana had done everything possible to slip under her radar. Rachel knows that she needs to have a talk with the cheerleading coach. At the very least she knows that she at least owes the woman an apology, but Rachel has a feeling that that might be a conversation that somebody like Sue Sylvester might want to be held in private so instead, Rachel decides to just concentrate on the way her face grows red with embarrassment towards the fact that Sue had called her out on trying to refuse treatment.

The sheriff seems to find the interaction humorous because he laughs again, this time while standing to his feet, crouching to avoid hitting his head as he makes his way back out of the ambulance.

"You girls take care of yourselves. I'll check in on you in a day or two." He makes the promise, climbing back down to solid ground while the two girls bob their heads obediently. When he settles back down to the floor, he pauses, turning towards Sue.

"Take care of them for me, will you?" he asks the woman, who delivers a curt nod.

"I always do," Sue insists with a tone that proves just how seriously she is taking this assignment.

The sheriff nods, satisfied and then, without further word, Rachel watches as he turns to the paramedics and gives the all clear to take her away from this place; away from Andrew and back towards Santana, just where she belongs.


Shelby Corcoran's hands are gripping tight onto the steering wheel.

She is flying, going 90 down Route 90 as she tries desperately to shorten the expansive time gap that exists between Chicago, Illinois and Lima, Ohio.

The anxiety is buzzing inside of her chest. She feels almost drunk with it and knows that she probably shouldn't be driving. If there were any other option, she would have taken it, but assuming she does not crash her car in the process, this route was the fastest. She owes it to her kids to make it to them. She will make it and she will do so by shaving at least an hour off of the standard four that this drive generally takes.

She isn't really sure how she had managed to get the rental car company to give her a car at all. She had gone inside remarkably distressed, and confronted by a remarkably ordinary attendant in a place as absurdly pleasant as a rental car company, Shelby's panic seemed almost vulgar. She had to force herself to speak slowly, in the register of the woman behind the desk, struggling to keep her balance between normalcy and hysteria. She had fought against her panic, almost ashamed by it.

It has been some two hours since Shelby had watched her oldest daughter get shot, almost an hour and a half since she had been forced to convince her youngest not to shoot the man responsible in cold blood although both Shelby and Rachel knew that he would have deserved it.

Since, Shelby's mind has not stopped working once. The only thing that is keeping her going is the reminder that she had already outlived her husband, she was not going to outlive her children too.

She wonders if this was her punishment; if her husband had watched her screw up with their children time and time again and finally decided that she could no longer be trusted with them on her own.

"You can't have them," Shelby hears herself whisper to a man who isn't even there. Her voice is strong and determined and even though her eyes are damp, the tears never fall. "Do you hear me? You can't have them. I know I screwed up but that's over, that's done."

She pauses, almost as if she is expecting him to answer her back from the sky. Shelby doesn't know if it is because she is concentrating so hard on a response or what, but after a moment, she feels as though she can actually hear one, whispering to her through the wind beating down against her car.

"Prove it."

She weaves dangerously in and out of traffic for another hour. She cuts off trucks and smart cars and minivans filled with families as though somehow, this reckless decision might cancel out the last hundred she has made and the clock will turn backwards to a time where she had never placed her children in such a precarious position in the first place.

An SUV going fifty in the fast lane slows her down. Shelby rides the car's bumper but the driver will not move out of her way and there is a semi approaching far too close to Shelby right for her to safely move herself.

The anxiety starts to thump even harder inside of her chest. Tears spring inside of her eyes as she lays on the horn and delivers three droning beeps. This seems to do the trick, because the van does move after that. Shelby assumes that the driver must have looked in the rearview and sensed her distress because when she accelerates past the van and catches a glimpse of the driver, the woman behind the wheel looks her right in the eye and doesn't even give her the finger like she has already been given six times on this drive alone.

Her cell phone goes off suddenly. The car had been otherwise silent and Shelby jumps a little bit at the noise before fumbling to pick up the phone that she has left resting inside of the cup holder for easy access should somebody call with an update on her kids.

"Hello?" she asks frantically into the phone. She hasn't even checked to see who was calling.

"Shelby…" It's Sue. The last that she had heard from Sue, she had just been getting into her rental vehicle while Sue had been just arriving at the hospital, trying to shuffle updates from Santana, Rachel, Brittany, and Quinn all at once. If anybody was up for that immense a task, Shelby knew that it was Sue Sylvester but still, a strain like that had to take its toll.

"Sue," Shelby pushes out a frantic breath. Talking somehow reminds her of her anxiety more than the silence had. "I'm still a little over two hours away. Have you heard anything? Please tell me you've heard something?"

"Are you driving?" Sue asks pointedly.

"Yes, but-"

"You need to pull over," Sue offers the direction with a tone that makes Shelby's heart skip a beat.

"I can't pull over Sue, my kids-"

"Will be a lot better off if their mother actually gets to them alive," Sue finishes Shelby's sentence for her. "Now pull over."

Shelby blinks into the dark belly of the highway for a moment debating, but ultimately resolves to throw her blinker on and pull onto the left shoulder where she breaks to a halt and flashes her hazards against the night. Sue was right, time was something that she could replace but her composure and subsequently, her life, was something that she was in fast danger of losing.

"Are you stopped?" Sue asks after a moment.

"I am," Shelby nods before remembering that Sue is not here to see it. She looks straight out the windshield. Her headlights are focused in on the highway sign that she had pulled her car in front of, one that informs her that the exit for Hamlet, Indiana is three quarters of a mile ahead and never in her life has one of her profound, existential crises made fun of her so blatantly.

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't." Or something like that.

Shelby tries to think about how that play ended but then remembers that it had done so in a hopeless bloodbath and tries not to think about it anymore. Instead, she presses Sue for news that is hopefully happier.

"How are they?"

"Santana is still in surgery. The doctors have to repair the artery and some of the muscle and tissue damage that the bullet did so they are expecting to be a while. Rachel was just taken upstairs for an MRI. Her doctor is concerned about a possible concussion. They did an X-Ray of her ribs and there are no breaks, just a bit of bruising which is good news, but her ankle is pretty badly sprained from the car accident. She won't need surgery on it or anything, her doctor just wants her off of it for a couple of weeks. All in all, she thinks that Rachel is going to be okay."

"She thinks?" Shelby emphasizes. Listening to Sue describing all of her children's injuries just makes her think of everything that they had been through while she was gone and the open-ended annotation at the end has her brain filling in the missing details in horrifying ways that she does not want to think about right now.

"Barring any unlikely complications," Sue says, making sure to highlight the word unlikely in her tone.

Shelby closes her eyes and exhales, trying to remind herself that Rachel's injuries were relatively minor compared to what could have been, compared to Santana…

If Shelby was being honest with herself, the idea that Santana was willing to take a bullet for her little sister was something that did not come as nearly as much of a surprise as the fact that a situation had arisen in which she'd had to at all. Santana's fierce loyalty and protective nature was something that ran deep inside of her veins courtesy of her father. Shelby knew that her husband would have done the same for any one of them, and while Shelby could have gone without the sky-rocketing blood pressure and the lingering panic of losing her first child, she could not deny the pride that she felt.

She struggles more with the idea that Rachel – her Rachel – was in the situation at all. She had been struggling with this since the moment that she learned what was happening behind her back. Her youngest daughter was always the hyper-cautious one of the family. The girl was independent of mind, but not so recklessly so. She would have never run into a situation like this on her own. Instead, it was her recklessness that had put her daughter in this position, and Shelby did not if she would ever be able to recover from that guilt.

"And Santana?" Shelby asks, her voice dipping as she tries desperately not to show the emotions that are currently flooding inside of her head. "She's going to make it, right?"

"The doctors seemed confident that they got to her in time," Sue tells her. Shelby notices the way that she purposely avoids using the same ambiguous wording she had made the mistake of using when describing Rachel's injuries. "It was a little touchy for a while, I'm going to be honest with you. Santana lost a lot of blood but the doctors seemed to be in agreement that Quinn's first aid saved her life. She stopped the bleeding enough to give her some time to get to the hospital. They gave her a few units of blood in the ER and she was taken into surgery about forty-five minutes ago. I got the impression that she might be in there for a while, but that the odds were in Santana's favor on this one."

Shelby takes a moment. Closing her eyes, she presses her forehead against the steering wheel and utters a small prayer not to God, but to her husband for being the guardian angel that they all so desperately needed tonight.

"Shelby?" Sue hears the woman calling to her and only then does she realize just how long she has been silent for.

"I'm sorry, I'm still here," Shelby answers, raising her head and wiping a couple of tears that had escaped from her eyes away.

She takes a couple of deep breaths, forcing her brain to focus because if she starts to think about how close she had come to losing Santana tonight, how she might still lose Santana tonight, then she would never be able to pull herself together long enough to finish this drive.

"How about Brittany and Quinn?" she forces herself to ask. "Are they okay?"

"Brittany had to get twenty-two stitches in her forehead. She had a pretty deep cut above her eye from the car accident."

"Jesus, was it that bad of an accident?" Shelby gasps before she could stop herself. The sheriff had not given her many details about it seeing by the time he'd arrived on the scene he'd been more concerned about the gun in Rachel's hands than the car. All she knew was that Brittany had been connected with a 911 dispatcher the entire time she had been in the car with Rachel and Andrew, and that that call had abruptly ended around the same time that somebody else reported a car on fire on the green at the country club. Now that she thought about it, an accident that had ended in a car fire was likely no small fender-bender, but now her imagination was getting away from her again and she didn't like it.

"Brittany swerved the car onto the golf course with the hope of distracting Andrew long enough to escape but I think that it may have gotten away from her a little bit," Sue admits timidly. "The car hit a tree and rolled once. Both girls were wearing their seatbelts. Andrew was ejected. The car caught fire afterwards but by that time, the girls had already escaped. Their injuries were not serious, Shelby,"

Shelby takes a deep breath. Sue seems to be reading her mind. She needs a moment to relish on how lucky they had gotten, in part thanks to the bravery of her children's friends. Quinn and saved Santana and it would seem like Brittany had been the one to save Rachel.

Shelby did not know Brittany as well as she knew Quinn, and she didn't know Brittany nearly as well as she wished she did given the emphasis that her oldest daughter placed on their romantic relationship, but Brittany had stepped up tonight and met the demands needed in order to ensure that both of her girls had survived the night. Shelby feels a sense of responsibility for Brittany and Quinn just as strongly as she feels one for Santana and Rachel.

"Quinn's water broke while she was still at your house," Sue presses after a moment. "There is no baby yet, but she was just taken upstairs to delivery. Her blood pressure is getting too high, the doctors aren't comfortable with letting her ride out the labor any longer. It's a little early, but the doctors are confident. Judy is with her. She's a little bit frightened, but she's okay too."

"What happened to Andrew?" Shelby asks, her lips pursed tight.

"He was arrested," Sue confirms. "But he was badly injured in the accident. The police took him to the hospital."

"The same hospital that my kids are in right now?" Shelby asks, growing defensive. She feels the heat rise inside of her cheeks and starts to yell despite herself.

"They will not cross paths," Sue assures her, and somehow, this satisfies Shelby; she believes her.

Andrew had been arrested. The news was good, but it has come far too late. The damage had already been done and now her deepest fear was that she would never have the opportunity to correct it.

She tries to push that negativity out of her head. Her children need her right now and she would not reduce herself to not being able to take care of them. She already had enough guilt towards the idea that Andrew Richardson was more than capable of, and had already come very close to killing both of her daughters while she went unscathed. Because of that man – a man that she had introduced them to – she had almost lost both of her children.

Shelby blinks her eyes a couple of times and tries to get the thought out of her head. This was an idea that she would not entertain. They're okay, Shelby tries to remind herself. We're going to be okay.

"Shelby, are you okay?" she hears Sue ask her.

"I'm fine," Shelby responds, her tone robotic. "Listen Sue, thank you for the update, but I have to go. I need to get back on the road. Please call me if you hear anything and please, please if you see my girls tell them that I'm on my way and that I love them."

Shelby doesn't wait for a response. Instead, she hangs the phone up with Sue, throwing it back down into the cup holder before flicking her hazards off and pressing her foot down against the gas even harder, tearing down the highway back in the direction of Lima, Ohio.


Watching Andrew shoot her daughter snaps something inside of Shelby.

Her security cameras are on a delay. It isn't by a lot – maybe five seconds – but it is enough that she hears the gunshot through the phone before she sees where the bullet lands.

That gray area had felt like a lifetime but then, she had watched Santana fall to the floor and time began to speed up once more as Shelby allowed her panic to grip her, but only for a moment.

She allowed her heart to drop as she watched Santana start to bleed onto the floor so much that she couldn't even tell where she was shot. She allowed a cry to escape her lips as she watched Andrew grab onto Rachel and drag her out of the house. Finally, she allowed herself to yell and scream and beg, but only for one moment.

After that, something incredible happened and Shelby regained control of her own mind before she could lose it entirely, realizing that to fix this was now up to her and to fail now would mean to fail her children and Shelby was not about to do that. Again.

Although Santana was no longer talking to her on the other side of the phone, hanging up the line that connected her to the inside of her house had been the hardest thing that Shelby had ever had to do. Looking at her daughter lying on the dining room floor, Shelby had no idea if she would ever get the opportunity to hear Santana's voice ever again, and she wasn't sure if she was ready to cut off that last remaining link that might ever exist between them.

But both of her daughters needed her help right now and Shelby was the only person in the entire world who had the advantage of both an outside and inside perspective on what was happening. She had spent enough of her time being selfish when her kids needed her the most so, with a quick breath of support, Shelby had ended the call between her and Santana with a single click of a button. The only question now was who she could call next.

911 seemed redundant. Her alarm company was already communicating with emergency services and she sees any dispatcher as merely being an intermediary who would prolong the length of communication time between Shelby and responding units. She trusted nobody but herself to do that. The problem is, she isn't sure who she trusts enough to send that information to.

One name flies into her head on the spot.

Officer Christopher Tyler was only twenty-two years old and a couple of months on the force on the day that Shelby stormed inside of the Lima Police Department, dragging Santana behind her only hours after losing Rachel to the foster care system. At the time, she had been struggling to find somebody to trust to give Rachel's clothing to; evidence that had found the right hands thanks to that young officer and would eventually amount to a sexual assault charge against Andrew. This time did not seem so different.

The officer was young, but that was good for Shelby because it meant that he hadn't yet been hardened and burned-out by experience. He still bared the capacity for empathy and understanding. That is exactly what Shelby had needed then and it is exactly what she needs now.

He had left her with a business card that day, one that she kept in her wallet at all times. It displayed both an office and a cell phone number and while Shelby isn't sure if it was a personal cell phone or work cell phone, she figured it would be worth a try.

The woman scrambles to the other side of the room for her purse which she had left on top of the desk. From her suite on the eighteenth floor, the glowing Chicago skyline stares back at her, judging thoroughly as Shelby dumps the contents of her purse onto the floor where her wallet slides out and hits the carpet with a dull thud.

She grabs the wallet, tearing into it, her desperation growing the longer it takes to find the card. She throws dollar bills, her Visa, a coupon from the local convenience store for $0.50 off a gallon of milk…

Finally, she finds the small white business card that she had been looking for.

Her fingers are shaking and she has a hard time reading the number and dialing simultaneously, but somehow manages and by some miracle, gets an answer on the second ring.

"Officer Tyler," the man breathes quickly into the phone. His voice is rushed and Shelby can hear the tell-tale sounds of chaos and sirens in the background. Suddenly, Shelby is very aware of the fact that she is all alone in the middle of the Viceroy Hotel suite that the Vocal Adrenaline boosters had set her up in, trying to mediate a police operation from two-hundred miles away.

"Hello?" the officer asks again when Shelby cannot seem to find her voice right away.

The mother swallows and stiffens, standing remarkably straight given her circumstances. She takes a deep breath and envelops the persona that she normally wears when she is around her students; the persona that she had been wearing all day despite her own children needing the real her so desperately.

She puts that thought out of her mind, recognizing that it is not productive and continues to meld herself into the character that she knows she will need to be in order to get through the rest of this night.

"Officer Tyler," she breathes, her voice never wavering. "This is Shelby Corcoran."


Shelby bursts into the hospital through the large sliding doors that lead into the Emergency Department.

The crowd is thick and eclectic this late on a Saturday night, but the people in the waiting area don't pay her any mind. They are all too focused on their own tragedies. Shelby notices that most of them look beaten and drained. They wear the exact same face that Shelby had on the first time she had been forced to come here, but that had been a long time ago.

She takes the familiar route to the front desk. She recognizes the woman who is sitting behind it because there had been a point in time a couple of months back where Shelby felt as though she was spending more time in the ER than she was inside of her own home.

The young girl with a blue streak in her hair glances up at her. The last time that Shelby had seen her, that streak had been green. Shelby remembers it because it had been the exact same color that Rachel had chosen for the cast on her arm right before CPS had taken her away.

"Can I help you?" the woman asks, snapping Shelby out of her thoughts. There is no hint of recognition in her eyes. Shelby realizes that that might be for the best.

"Yes, I'm looking for my daughters. They were brought here a couple of hours ago." Her voice is miraculously calm, but when she waits for the woman to give her the information that she is looking for only to have her continue to stare at her blankly, Shelby feels that rubber band that is holding together the last of her cool stretch to near breaking.

"Can I have their names?" the woman asks Shelby after a moment recognizing her need to be prompted. Shelby swallows, trying not to unravel.

"Santana and Rachel Corcoran," she answers through gritted teeth. If the woman behind the desk notices her agitation, she makes no indication of it as she types the names into the computer. Each stroke of her finger seems to take forever. It feels to Shelby like she is waiting for the woman to engrave her children's names into stone.

Shelby's fingers start to drum against the countertop in time with the woman's typing. Her teeth are grit so hard that her jaw hurts. When the typing stops abruptly, Shelby is so focused inside of her own head that it takes her a moment to notice. When she does finally look back down at the woman behind the desk, she realizes that the younger girl's demeanor has changed in a way that makes her stomach drop.

"Um… let me just go get a doctor for you," she says quickly before scurrying out of her chair and through a small door behind her, disappearing before Shelby could even think to stop her.

Shelby feels her heart start to speed up as she stares desperately at the door that the woman had just disappeared behind, waiting for her to come back, waiting for her to tell Shelby that she is sorry, but there has been a mistake; both of her girls were fine so they had already been released and were now waiting for her from the safety of their own home. Shelby knows that this is a fantasy but somehow, it gives her comfort anyway.

Then she starts to think about the nervous look the receptionist had given her before she left and the panic starts to settle all over again. Had something happened in her absence? She hasn't heard from Sue in over two hours, since the cheerleading coach had forced her to pull over onto the side of the highway. It seemed possible that something terrible could have happened in that time frame. She would like to think that Sue would have called her to tell her right away, but then again, it also seemed likely that Sue would not have wanted to put that kind of strain on Shelby while she was driving…

Her heart leaps inside of her throat. Her head is pounding as she counts the time it takes for the woman behind the desk to get a doctor based on her frantic heartbeats. She feels dizzy with the strain and a hot sweat erupts across her forehead. By the time the woman comes back, Shelby feels like she is having a heart attack.

She is so busy concentrating on not passing out that she doesn't even realize that there is another person present until the third woman steps up right in front of her.

"Shelby?"

She hears her name being called, but the voice sounds distant and the face in front of her is nothing but a blur of incomprehensible features like a Gideon Rubin painting.

"Shelby are you okay?" the voice asks again and then pauses. "Maggie, will you please help me get Mrs. Corcoran to the chairs?"

"I'm okay." Shelby's world comes to focus in the reminder that she cannot be caught losing her cool. She cannot be perceived as weak in a time where she can afford to be nothing but strong. "I don't need to sit, I'm fine."

"Shelby, are you sure?" the same woman asks her with a whisper and gradually, as the world comes into focus, Shelby starts to recognize the face that goes alone with the voice.

Dr. Medina had been the first doctor to ever treat Rachel and Shelby finds herself grateful that she was here this time as well. She had become a lifeline to Shelby in recent months, as becomes proof when Shelby finds herself clutching onto the doctor's shoulders for support, gripping tightly.

"Where are they?" she asks. She is aware that her voice is frantic and her face must look crazy, especially when the concern in the doctor's face only deepens.

"Shelby, you need to sit down," the doctor tells her, still trying to steer her towards the seats. For being such a small woman, the doctor is surprisingly strong. Still, she is no match for Shelby, who has the force of a worried mother on her side.

"Please," Shelby begs, refusing to budge. "Where are they?"

"Santana is still in surgery," the doctor finally sighs, recognizing defeat when she sees it.

"She's alive?" Shelby asks. She does not mean to sound so surprised, but she had managed to convince herself that Santana was gone so thoroughly that the news that she in fact wasn't almost makes the mother fall to the ground in her relief.

"She's alive," the doctor confirms with a nod and Shelby has to resist the urge to wrap her up in a bear hug.

"She was given blood when she got here. We worked on her in the ER for a little while, but there was a small tear in her femoral artery that required surgical intervention. She had already lost a lot of blood, but that blonde girl that she was with, she knew exactly what to do. She saved her life."

Shelby takes a shaky breath. This is not the first time that she had been told what an instrumental role Quinn had played in saving Santana's life tonight. She makes a mental note of what she owes to the blonde girl in return, but pushes forward.

"And Rachel?"

"She's a bit shaken up and she will certainly be sore for a couple of days, but I'm confident that her injuries are mostly superficial. She's sleeping in an exam room in the back right now. I can take you to her if you'd like."

Shelby nods her head so vigorously that it feels like it is about to roll right off of her neck. The doctor senses her urgency, wasting no more time before guiding the mother through the doors that separate the waiting area from the emergency room.

She leads Shelby down lines of cubicles and stretchers that are filled with the characteristic moans, groans, and beeps of a crowded Emergency Room. Shelby isn't sure why, but the presence of so many other sick and injured people is making her uneasy.

She doesn't like the idea of how busy the ER is tonight for fear that all of the doctors and nurses had been strained to get to each patient. Shelby knew from experience how rushing could lead to errors and now, inside of her head, she isn't thinking about how Dr. Medina had told her that Rachel would be fine, but instead, what she might have missed.

"You're absolutely sure that Rachel is going to be alright?" Shelby asks, cutting through the silence. She knows that she is being inexorable, but she has so much uncertainty about what is going to happen with Santana, she needs to make up for it through absolutely certainty with Rachel.

"Her MRI came back clean. She has a pretty nasty bruise on the side of her head that she said came from hitting it on one of the steps in your house, but we couldn't find any evidence of any damage aside from the bruise. She has some bruised ribs, but no cracks or breaks. Her ankle was the worst of her injuries. She has a pretty bad sprain, but we'll put her in an air cast for a couple of weeks and she'll have to gradually work up to putting weight back on it."

"That's it?" Shelby asks, almost begging but when the doctor only glances at her solemnly, Shelby knows that there is something else, something else that the doctor has been keeping from her until the end purposefully.

"There was something else," Dr. Medina breathes and Shelby sucks the air in and holds onto it. "Rachel has some bruises around her neck that concerned me. When I asked her about them, she told me that she was strangled nearly to the point that she lost consciousness."

Shelby releases the breath that she had been holding but does not take another one. Instead, she brings her own hand subconsciously up to cradle her throat as though she is trying to imagine what it must have felt like for Rachel to have Andrew's large, strong hands wrapped around her neck, squeezing tighter and tighter until no more oxygen could possibly get in.

"She isn't experiencing any side effects right now. We monitored her breathing for about an hour after she arrived and it was fine. The MRI didn't show anything indicative of brain damage, but with injuries like this, you need to be aware of small occlusions of the veins and arteries from the pressure on the neck. Sometimes, they get stuck in that pinched position which can lead to things like diminished oxygen, blood clots, hemorrhages… Things that happen slowly and might take a couple of days to a couple of weeks to show symptoms."

"I'm sorry, what are you saying? That Rachel is going to end up having a stroke or something?"

"No," the doctor says quickly, trying to get this notion of definitiveness out of Shelby's brain before the woman could work herself up into even more of a panic. "What I'm saying is that in rare cases, it has been known to happen. Rachel is young, her body is otherwise healthy which makes it even more unlikely, but you do need to be on top of observing her behavior for the next two or three weeks. If you notice anything odd like lethargy, motor skill difficulties, or any out of the ordinary neurological behaviors, you need to bring her in ASAP. But like I said, everything appears to be fine and she is ready to be discharged. She has been ready, but she fell asleep in the ER about an hour ago and I figured I would let her rest. If you want, she can use the bed as long as she needs it."

Shelby stares up at the doctor, mouth agape towards the idea that she had just followed up telling Shelby that she had to watch Rachel for neurological symptoms with the notion that her daughter was ready to be discharged. She swallows her shock for the moment and nods her head towards the doctor. She would let Rachel sleep inside of this safety net surrounded by doctors and nurses and life-saving equipment for as long as she could. Preferably for the next two to three weeks, until she was confident that Rachel was out of the woods despite all of her doctor's assurances.

Besides, her daughter needed her rest. Adrenaline has kept Shelby going up until this point, but she is starting to become very aware of the fact that it is rapidly approaching three a.m. She has been awake for almost twenty-four hours now and the exhaustion was starting to hit her hard.

"Do you know about… about him?" Shelby asks cautiously, throwing her exhaustion to the side for the sake of her children.

"I don't," the doctor shakes her head sympathetically, immediately understanding exactly who Shelby is talking about. "He's been placed under arrest meaning that only the ER staff who were assigned to his case have access to him. He will be treated here under constant guard, but he will be released to the officers as soon as he is stable enough to be transferred to the prison clinic."

"Where is he?"

"Far away from Rachel and Santana," the doctor tells Shelby, who immediately stops asking questions in the understanding that this is as much as the doctor would be able to tell her.

They come to a halt inside of a small, quieter section of the ER directly in front of a curtained-off area that Shelby knows Rachel is inside of. The mother's stomach twists with the anticipation of seeing her, remembering how fearful she had been of never seeing her again only hours before.

"Shelby, I know that you're in an impossible situation right now but you have to know that Rachel is in much better shape than she was in the first time the two of us were having this conversation," the doctor assures Shelby, her voice lowering to a whisper. "She is an entirely different person than the girl I met six months ago and for the record, I think that you are doing an incredible job helping her and Santana and yourself through all of this."

Shelby sucks in a breath and nods her head, unable to find the words to thank the doctor for the confidence; confidence that she doesn't even seem to have in herself.

"I checked in on her about a half hour ago and she was out like a light," the doctor smirks at Shelby. "But I'm sure she'll be glad to see you when she does wake up."

Shelby nods her head trying to control the tears that have suddenly sprung into her eyes. She doesn't want the first thing her daughter sees after waking up to be her mother blubbering over her.

Dr. Medina pulls the curtain back, giving Shelby permission to enter. The mother takes a step forward and then freezes. For a moment, she doesn't know what she is supposed to be looking at.

The first thing that she thinks is that the doctor is trying to play some bizarre prank on her but then she hears the smaller woman next to her gasp with surprise and she realizes that Dr. Medina has not been expecting this any more than she had been; an empty cot where Rachel should have been sleeping, and a crumpled up sheet thrown to the ground providing evidence that Rachel had somehow, once more, slipped right out from in between their outstretched fingers.


Tonight was the first night in a string of three consecutive weeks of night shift for Officer Christopher Tyler. He was generally designated to days, but his chief who usually made the schedule was on vacation, leaving the duty to his second-in-command; an ill-mannered lieutenant who for some reason hated the young officer's guts.

Still not used to the abrupt change in shifts, Officer Tyler knew it was going to be a long night for him even before a 911 call had come in from a local alarm company reporting a hostage situation inside one of the residential homes of West Lima.

The man was just rushing towards his cruiser to respond to the call when his cell started to ring.

He knew that he should have ignored it. It was an unknown number and he was in the middle of responding to the biggest call that Lima has seen since a woman had caught her husband cheating and tried (and failed) to kill him with a shotgun for it in the late nineties.

Something in his gut however told him to answer and he was glad that he did, because if the man responsible for holding three teenage girls hostage was the person that the police wanted to talk to the most right now, the mother of two of those three teenage girls was probably a close second.

"Tyler, we need you to stay behind."

Chris was just trying to assure the mother that he would update her the moment he arrived on the scene when his current acting chief – the one with a personal vendetta against him for no apparent reason – stormed towards him.

The aging officer is wearing full riot gear that is dusty and outdated and makes him look ridiculous. The visor is raised on his helmet and through the eye holes, the younger officer can see the fake look of sympathy his lieutenant pretends to wear regarding his order.

"But Lieutenant Grady-"

"I'm sorry Tyler, but we need somebody to stay back. The Allen County Sheriff is taking over this case, we have plenty of units-"

"But Lieutenant," the young officer cuts his superior off once more and when the older man silences and narrows his eyes in on his subordinate, daring him, he tries not to shudder as he holds his cell phone up to the man's face, showing him the connected line as though trying to prove a point. "I have Shelby Corcoran on the phone."


The front of the Corcoran home looks like a circus.

It is late in the evening, but the flashing lights from all of the emergency vehicles make it look as though it were the middle of the day.

Police cruisers and ambulances congest the residential block. It had been determined already that the suspect had left the home with one of the girls and a friend of the Corcorans who had been waiting outside in her Ford Explorer. Dispatch was currently working on pinging the cell phone of one of the girls that was still attached to the emergency line, but the Allen County Sheriff had still responded to the incident by sending a SWAT team to the Corcoran house anyway.

Crowds gather outside, looking on. Aside from the substantial police presence, now the neighbors have also gained interest. There were those who had been trying to get home from a Saturday night out only to find their streets cordoned off, now forced to watch their street be turned into a crime scene from behind police barricades and then there were the lucky few gathered in their pajamas out on the front porches or ends of driveways trying to see what was causing the commotion that had pulled them out of their sleep.

Shelby starts to ask Officer Tyler for information the second that he steps out of his cruiser. Normally, the buzzing inside of his head would drive him crazy but today he is grateful for her voice inside of his ear because it reminds him that he has a job to do and how well he does that job will affect the lives of a family who has already lost so much. He cannot just sit and stare at the tragedy unfold like he was one of the innocent bystanders on the other side of the barricades. He is also grateful because if it weren't for Shelby Corcoran, his lieutenant would have left him behind the front desk answering phone calls for noise complaints and underage drinking all night while the rest of his unit got to respond to the biggest crime scene Lima, Ohio has ever seen.

His lieutenant had insisted he hand the phone over the second the young officer made the mistake of telling the older man who he'd had on the other line. Lieutenant Grady told him that talking to a frightened mother was not a job for a young officer barely out of his probationary period, but when the officer did hand the phone over to his superior, Shelby Corcoran was having none of it. She demanding to be put back on with Officer Tyler and in terms of complying with the hierarchical system of the police force rank structure, everybody knew that the rank of mother was the highest of them all.

"Can you see Santana?" the worried mother pants through the phone with a catch inside of her voice that tells the officer that there is no way that he can go much longer without the whisper of an update on his lips without having Shelby Corcoran break down right inside of his ear.

The man looks back towards the Corcoran home, watching paramedics and officers rush into and out of the house and recalls the report that the oldest Corcoran girl had been shot in what appeared to be her upper leg.

The front door of the home is wide open to make room for the plethora of people moving in and out. Officer Tyler can see the shadows of those inside moving through the windows like ghosts, but he cannot recognize anybody from out here. So far, he sees no evidence of there being a person who is not wearing a uniform inside of that house.

"Not yet," the officer swallows, trying to make it sound like he is expecting something soon although truth-be-told he feels just as confused as she sounds, even from within the thick of the chaos.

"Officer Tyler!" he hears his name and pulls his eyes away from the house to look behind him. His lieutenant is staring at him with an irritated look on his face and his hands on his hips. Directly in front of him is a man who Officer Tyler recognizes as the county sheriff. He had only met the sheriff once – and that was only briefly at his graduation from the police academy – but today, the sheriff is speaking to him directly, waving him forward towards him. The young officer wastes no time and jogs towards the two men.

"I hear that you have Shelby Corcoran on the phone, son," he informs the young officer, nodding his head towards the cell phone still clutched in the younger man's white-knuckled grip.

"I do, Sheriff."

"I told him that he has more important things to do, Sheriff," the lieutenant laments like he is trying to suggest the young man has a history of disobeying direct orders. His chest is jutted out, his head turned down, sad. It is clear that he is trying to impress his superior just by stomping all over him. As if to prove a point, he turns back to the young officer and takes it a step further. "Talking with those girls' mother is not your responsibility, Tyler. If you can't do your job, you need to hang up that phone."

Officer Tyler can tell that the man is still personally affronted from being rejected by Shelby Corcoran earlier and for some reason, this is what causes something to come loose inside of the young officer.

"With all due respect, Lieutenant Grady, I have been working with this family for a pretty long time now and their caliber towards trusting the Lima Police Department is pretty small after all of the crap we've put them through, so for as long as Mrs. Corcoran is in Chicago and her children are here under our watch, I am going to give her the answers that she is looking for."

Seven months of being treated like crap by a man who was technically his boss right now boils to the surface of his brain and spills over the edge. His face is burning. Across from him, the color of his lieutenant's cheeks matches what he imagines his to look like perfectly.

"Sheriff Walker, this is headquarters."

Before another word can be spoken, a call comes in through the radio clipped to the sheriff's belt, cutting through the silence. The man glares at the two officers before him, daring them to do something that will only make his job harder than it already is before grabbing the radio and holding it up to his mouth.

"Send it," he speaks quickly before releasing the talk button, waiting for a response.

"Our dispatcher just lost the connection that she had from inside of Brittany Pierce's car. She informed us that the call was cut off abruptly and that it sounded like a possible accident occurred before the line went dead. Another call came in just under two minutes ago from a resident of Country Club Road reporting what looked like a car fire on the golf course. It is in roughly the same area that our last ping placed the Pierce girl's car."

"HQ, we are dispatching units to the scene right now," the sheriff says. His entire face has changed, his voice moving as quickly as his feet. He is mobilizing a team to head towards the scene before he is even finished speaking, shouldering his way through the two bickering police officers. He makes it only a couple of steps before he realizes that nobody is following him and turns back over his shoulder.

"Tyler," he addresses the young patrolman, who perks at the sound of his name. "Are you coming or not?"

The young officer brightens at the personal invitation from the county sheriff, trying to pretend not to notice the way that his superior's head and neck reddens only deeper underneath his helmet at not even being acknowledged.

"Mrs. Corcoran, we have a possible location on Rachel," the young officer breathes quickly into the phone as he jogs back to his cruiser so that the convoy heading towards the golf course will not leave him behind. "We're heading over there right now."

He does not mention the possibility of an accident, of a car fire. He doesn't want to work the mother up unnecessarily when she is already worrying herself into a panic.

"What about Santana?" the mother breathes into the phone, causing the young officer to dig his heels into the ground and stop dead in his tracks. He had been so excited about being personally invited by the sheriff to help find the youngest Corcoran girl that he had almost forgotten that this was still a very real tragedy playing out in real time and he was the only connection that the mother had to both of her children.

"The paramedics are inside with her," the young man freezes, glancing towards the house as he once again attempts to get a peak of what is happening inside with no luck.

"Well, do you know if she's at least alive?" the mother asks, desperate and then the officer hears her start to tear up. "She was bleeding so badly. Please tell me that she's not gone. Please."

"I-"

"Officer Tyler!" he is cut off from trying to give Shelby the answer to a question that he doesn't have when he hears his name being called. He snaps his head towards the voice. Sheriff Walker is sticking out of the open passenger door of his cruiser. His driver is already behind the wheel, looking impatient. The red and blue lights flash in the sheriff's face, reflecting the expression of wonderment towards what is taking this young officer so long to respond to the opportunity of a lifetime. "Son, if you're coming, it needs to be now!"

"Officer Tyler, where is my daughter?" Shelby is in his ear on one side, the sheriff on the other. They are embarking in a vicious tug-of-war without even being aware of it but there is something about the panic in the mother's voice that is holding him back. The longer he takes to answer, the more she is yelling and begging and crying and his mouth is open, his brain telling him to give her something but nothing ever comes out.

The sudden commotion at the front of the Corcoran home seems to come just in time. He looks up, watching as a handful of paramedics burst through the open front door, dragging a stretcher along with them so fast that it looks like they are trying to set a qualifying time for the Indy 500.

It takes him a couple of moments to adjust his eyes long enough to recognize that there is a person on the stretcher; a young girl with a familiar face even though he had only met Santana Corcoran once before.

The young girl looks nothing like she had the last time he had seen her. Her skin is so pale that it looks almost translucent and even from here he can see the blue tinge that lines her features. Her eyes had been on fire the last time he had seen her; fierce, strong, demanding. Tonight, they are closed and her face limp. She shows nothing of the feisty personality that he knows from experience, that small body holds.

The paramedics are buzzing around her like flies. One of them is actually riding on the stretcher with her. The small woman is on her knees at the foot of the gurney, pressing what looks to be a bed sheet tight against Santana's leg. At first, the officer thinks that it is weird that the ambulance would be using scarlet red sheets and then he catches the splotches of white along the fabric and realizes that the color is courtesy of Santana Corcoran's blood, draining the life out of her with every drop.

At first glance, it looks like the paramedics might already be too late. Santana looks long gone. But then again, they are moving with much more urgency than they would have been had they been transporting nothing but a body. One of the paramedics behind Santana is holding an IV bag filled with clear fluid high above his head while another is using a small bag to pump oxygen into her lungs through a thin tube and the officer realizes that if Santana Corcoran were already dead, then there would be no need for all of this fanfare. The teenager's situation seemed precarious but for now, it was not without hope

"Santana is alive," the officer breathes into the phone. He is not sure who sounds more relieved by this fact; him or her mother. "She's being brought to the hospital right now."

"Tyler!" the sheriff screams at him again. "Last chance, let's go!"

Uncertainty filters inside of the young man as he watches the paramedics make a mad dash towards the awaiting ambulance and hurry to load Santana into the back. He realizes that while Shelby deserves to know what the police are doing to find her youngest, Santana should not be left alone right now.

"You go. I'm staying with her," the officer says before he can stop himself, pointing towards the ambulance. The older man looks surprised that he is the one being told what to do by a boy who has barely been on the force a couple of months. He watches the young officer jog up to him with an expression on his face like he is physically pained by the Corcoran's predicament and he realizes that Christopher Tyler is going to be one of the good ones.

"Please, Sheriff, these girls' mother is not stopping until she gets answers," he tells the sheriff, his light eyes dipping seriously. "These guys have been through a lot recently. She needs something, but I'm not leaving Santana alone."

The sheriff doesn't really know what to say. The young man in front of him sounds like he is losing a screw or two. The sheriff has been around long enough to understand that this can sometimes happen in situations like this.

But before he can think to ask the boy if he is feeling alright, he feels the officer push something small and flat into his hand before sprinting off in the direction of the ambulance without so much as another word.

The sheriff watches him go for just a moment before looking down into his outstretched palm to see what the officer had just left him with. His eyes find a cell phone, the screen glistening with a phone number across the top and a small clock ticking away the passing time like a tease and the sheriff realizes that one of his newest officers had just passed the burden of making this case personal straight onto him.


Somehow, Shelby is the calm one in this equation.

After Rachel had been determined missing, chaos had erupted throughout the ER like a warzone. But Shelby couldn't afford to lose anymore battles and she already knew from experience that panic led to mistakes and mistakes led to catastrophe.

She watched the hospital call for a lock down. She watched them put a code out for her missing child and watched the staff who had been responsible for Rachel process the empty bed and shut their minds down to the burden of responsibility yet somehow, Shelby herself remained calm.

There was a sense that she felt inside of her gut that told her that her daughter was not in any danger and the more she listened to that voice, the more it guided her.

While those inside of the ER ran in frantic circles, screaming her daughter's name and searching inside of every single face in the hopes that it would transform into Rachel's, Shelby slipped away.

Knowing her daughter, Rachel would be looking to gravitate towards the familiar. Her first stop would be Santana but of course, that was impossible with Santana in surgery. The second best thing that Shelby could think of was Quinn, which is why Shelby finds herself walking up the stairs towards the hospital's main lobby where she approaches the front desk and asks the man standing behind it if he could tell her the number to Quinn Fabray's hospital room.

"I'm afraid visiting hours are over," the man shakes his head sadly as though it were not obvious that the hospital's visiting hours policy did not extend to 3:00 in the morning; as if Shelby had accidentally mistaken Lima Memorial Hospital for a frat house. "Unless you are the parents or the next of kin, I'm afraid that you cannot see her until the morning."

"I'm the adoptive mother of her baby."

The lie slips from Shelby's lips before she can so much as think about it. She feels horrible for exploiting a situation that she knew from talking to Judy that Quinn is heartbroken over. But seeing how that is the only thing that will get her the room number that she so desperately needs, Shelby figures that karma will forgive her this time around.

"Well in that case, congratulations are in order," the man flashes her a smile. He is tall and skinny and is wearing a suit and tie that looks utterly ridiculous given the fact that he is working the graveyard shift in a hospital lobby closed for visitors, but Shelby's stage presence cannot falter, so it doesn't.

"Thank you." Shelby tells the man. She is trying to think of the very first time that she had ever held Santana or Rachel as newborns in her arms. She is trying to tap into the strength of that memory and use the emotion to put on her best new-mom face in order to be convincing, but the man is already writing her out a guest pass and when he hands it to her to stick onto her blouse, he is still smiling.

"Ms. Fabray is in maternity on the fourth floor. Make the first right out of the elevators and you'll run right into it. Her room number is 426."

Shelby smiles at the man and thanks him once more. She is just about to walk away when something else pops inside of her head and she backtracks.

"Do you know if they're okay?" she asks, her face faltering. "Quinn and the baby, I mean?"

The man frowns at her before glancing down at his illuminated computer screen.

"I'm afraid I can't really say…" he sighs with a low drawl, one that Shelby recognizes from hearing some of the booster moms at her school talk; the ones who are more prone to gossip, who like to add a little suspense to their stories even though everybody knew that eventually they were going to tell everything anyway. "But the baby girl was registered into the hospital system about an hour ago. It says that the mother opted to keep the baby in the room with her after delivery so she must be healthy. You'll have to speak with her doctor for any more information, though I'm sorry."

"That's fine. Your information was more than enough." Shelby nods to the man with a soft smile before rushing away. She takes the stairs all the way up to the fourth floor because having to wait for an elevator would have made her lose the last sense of calm that she was keeping intact.

She follows the man's direction and takes the first right out of the stairwell. As he'd stated, it was hard to miss the maternity ward. It was much more cheerful here than it had been downstairs in the ER.

Shelby displays her valid visitor's pass proudly, but nobody seems to pay her any mind. Despite being littered with newborns, the ward is quiet as Shelby prowls through the hallways in a desperate search for room 426.

When she finally does find it, Shelby forces herself to slow down. The door is closed, but a steady light is streaming out of the small window embedded inside of it.

Shelby knows that she would do Rachel and Quinn no good by barging inside and demanding answers so instead, she peers quietly inside of the room through the small window.

The first person that she sees is Quinn. The girl's blonde hair is pulled into a sloppy bun and the loose-fitting hospital gown that she is wearing hangs low against her chest. She looks exhausted and slightly groggy, but otherwise perfectly healthy.

Shelby follows the young blonde's eyes, which are permanently glued on something in the far corner of the room and that is where she finds Rachel.

She feels a little bit of the tension slide out of her muscles the moment she sees her daughter. Rachel is sitting Indian style in a large arm chair in the corner of he room. Inside of her arms, she is cradling a small bundle wrapped tight in a white blanket with pink and blue lines crisscrossed all over it like lasers.

Her daughter is staring down at the tiny girl in her arms in awe, like she is trying to fit the hopes of the whole world inside of that one little soul. She feeds the little girl her finger and when the baby finally finds it and wraps her entire fist around the girth of Rachel's index finger, her eyes light up.

The infant girl is smiling up at Rachel and Rachel smiles back down at the girl. It is a nice that the first expression that Shelby sees on her daughter's face tonight is a smile given the circumstances and she takes it as a good sign.

The young girl seems to feel somebody staring at her. Rachel's head peels up from the infant in her arms and swivels towards the door. When she sees her mother staring in at her through the tiny window, the smile slides off of Rachel's face like melting plastic and instead, she looks like she is ready to burst into tears of relief.

Rachel moves carefully at first. She stands up from her seat wordlessly and tips the infant back into the clear incubator besides Quinn's bed. Shelby watches a tiny fist shoot up from within the confines, begging for the contact to return, but Rachel needs her own comfort at the moment.

The girl moves quickly towards the door. She takes awkward, lumbering steps and for the first time, Shelby notices the large, black boot wrapped tight around Rachel's right ankle, swaddling it just as tight as she had been swaddling the infant in her arms moments before.

Shelby is so distracted by trying to evaluate her daughter's injuries from the doorway that she doesn't even see it coming when Rachel rips open the door to Quinn's room and plows straight into her midsection, bleeding into her body tight. They clutch onto each other, keeping themselves upright on weak legs.

"Thank God I found you," Shelby murmurs into her daughter's hair, pulling her in closer. To her surprise, Rachel manages a chuckle.

"I was never lost," she says, looking up at her mother with a small, watery smile. Shelby wonders if Rachel knows that she is crying.

"Tell that to the ER staff downstairs," Shelby tells Rachel, wiping one of the tears out from the younger girl's eyes and flicking it away into oblivion.

She looks her daughter up and down, taking in the girl's appearance. Her injuries look bad, but just like Dr. Medina had said, are mostly superficial.

Shelby's thumb comes up, brushing a split in Rachel's lip. She watches Rachel wince when it stings, but for some reason, Shelby can't seem to pull away. Her eye looks terrible. A bruise is already well developed across the side of her head and face and has now taken to swelling up to roughly the size of a baseball. What really horrifies her however, are the handprint shaped bruises around her throat and Shelby remembers what the doctor had told her about keeping an eye out for side effects of strangulation injuries that may take weeks to emerge.

"I'm okay, mom," Rachel reads her mother's mind, ducking out of her watchful eye before Shelby can even ask. The mother isn't so convinced, but she recognizes that she can let it go for the time being and allows Rachel to guide her inside of Quinn's room.

"Quinn honey, how are you feeling?" she asks the blonde politely, approaching the girl's bed. Both of the blonde's hands are folded inside of her lap. Shelby places one of her own hands on top of Quinn's squeezing, trying to convey a million words into one tiny gesture. Quinn's face however, remains stoic. She offers Shelby a single shrug of her shoulders but nothing more.

"Where's your mom?" she pushes. "And Sue?"

"Sue went with Judy," Rachel answers for Quinn, her voice a whisper. The mother's head darts over her shoulder. She looks at her own daughter with all of her questions written on her face. "They're trying to get in touch with the adoption agency to let them know that the baby was born. They… they don't exactly know that I'm here."

Rachel's face flames red as Shelby raises an eyebrow.

"I didn't want to leave Quinn alone!" she insists, gauging her mother's reaction.

With a sigh, Shelby looks past Rachel back towards the tiny infant in her incubator. Tiny sounds of displeasure escape the newborn's throat; a song of resentment towards being ripped from the comforts of her mother's stomach so early, only to have to immediately be swept up in the dramatics of the outside world. Shelby thinks that she understands exactly how the young child is feeling and turns back to Quinn.

The blonde's haggard appearance and less than talkative mood suddenly make sense to Shelby. She recognizes that it doesn't matter if you have known your child forever or just for a couple of hours, you would still do anything for them, even if that anything breaks you in the process. She is upset that the blonde had to learn that lesson so young but reasons that it is better than waiting to learn it until your kids were already grown enough to remember what had been missing.

"Rachel would you mind waiting outside in the hallway for a minute?" Shelby asks. Even she is surprised by the words that are coming out of her own mouth.

"What?" Rachel asks her to repeat herself, shocked by the request.

"I'll be out in just a minute," she promises her daughter with a sad smile. "I just want to talk to Quinn."

Rachel looks reluctantly between her mother and Quinn. She didn't want to leave the room for two reasons: one, because she still isn't quite convinced that her mother was being serious and two, she hardly wanted to leave Quinn. Once two people had made a sacrifice for each other like her and Quinn had made tonight, those two people become intertwined. Like it or not, her, Quinn, Brittany, and Santana were linked now, and that bond holding them together was permanent.

"There are chairs right across the hall, Rachel," Shelby points out when Rachel still does not move. "Wait there for me. Please do not move this time."

"I won't," Rachel flushes, finally turning to make her way unsteadily towards the door, still struggling to get used to walking with the terrible boot the doctors had placed on her foot.

"And Rachel," Shelby calls her daughter back just as the girl is straddling the space between the room and the hallway. Rachel clutches onto the doorframe, turning back to look inside the room just in time to watch her mother grab onto her crutches – which had been propped unused against the wall – and hand them to her. "Don't think that Dr. Medina hasn't already told me that you are to use these at all times for the next couple of days."

The girl grimaces, but accepts the crutches reluctantly, shoving them underneath her arms with a groan.

"This will be quick, baby," Shelby promises with a whisper, her voice softening dramatically as she kisses the crown of her daughter's head. "I promise."

Rachel looks skeptical, but nods her head anyway. Shelby looks proud at her daughter's strength although she knows she could take no credit for it. What she does understand is what it feels like to be left alone when you don't want to be. Shelby watches the emotion skew in Rachel's face, so real that they transcend the impossible. Needing a stable hook to hold onto, she falls into the seat that Shelby had assigned for her. Only then does Shelby push back inside of Quinn's room and close the door behind her softly.

"Can I hold her?" Shelby asks Quinn after a moment, nodding towards the baby. The blonde girl only shrugs.

"Sure."

Shelby reaches carefully into the incubator, her arms sliding around the tiny body of the newborn. She shushes the infant, who fusses from the change in position only momentarily before relaxing against the warmth of Shelby's body.

It has been years since Shelby has held a baby, yet she finds the technique sliding immediately back to her without second thought. Like riding a bike, you never really forget.

The baby coos against this new set of arms and blinks up at Shelby with foggy blue eyes the color of the sky right before dawn.

"She's beautiful, Quinn," Shelby tells the new mother with a bright smile. She hikes the baby slightly higher against her chest, inhaling the soothing scent of a newborn. The sparse, strawberry blonde curls on top of the little girl's head tickle underneath Shelby's chin and she immediately thinks back to when her own girls had been born. Santana hadn't grown so much as a wisp of hair until she was nearly a year old. Her husband – whose hair was just starting to thin at the time – loved it. "I told you she looked like me," Shelby remembers him beaming proudly at any given opportunity.

Rachel on the other hand, came into the world with dark, thick hair that sat on top of her head like a mane. Premature, Shelby can still remember the small, thick hair that had sprouted all over Rachel's tiny body to try and keep her warm. Shelby can remember a four-year-old Santana waddling into the room to see her baby sister for the first time with that uncoordinated toddler gait asking her mother if she had gotten a new baby sister, or a new puppy because Rachel was so - as Santana put it - furry.

"Thanks," Quinn deadpans, pulling Shelby out of her memory.

The older woman takes her time, relishing on the feeling of holding something so fresh, so new inside of her arms again. She bounces the child gently, circling the room. Through the corner of her eye, she watches Quinn watching her the entire time. She is quite certain that she hasn't seen Quinn take her eyes off of her daughter once since she had come into this room.

"Actually, I think that I should be the one thanking you," she tells Quinn after a moment. She watches carefully as Quinn's eyes flicker up to meet hers, clearly confused.

"What do you mean?"

"I've heard from more than one source tonight that you saved my daughter's life tonight," Shelby says and then pauses. "Both of them."

Quinn shakes her head, her eyes pulling away sad.

"I almost got Rachel and Santana killed tonight," she tells Shelby. "I had this idea in my head that if I faked how bad my contractions were, it would distract Andrew. Then they actually did start to get bad and… I was so worried about the baby that I let Andrew shoot Santana and take Rachel. That never would have happened if it wasn't for me."

Shelby pauses for a moment. She realizes that there are a million things that she can say to Quinn. She could state the obvious, that the burden of what had happened tonight rested solely on Andrew's shoulders, or that despite what could have been, that they had made it through to the other side a little broken, a little bruised, but otherwise intact…

Where they stood right now, Andrew had lost everything and the four girls whose lives he had tried to destroy tonight, nothing. Instead, they had welcomed another beautiful little girl into this world and if the child inside of Shelby's arms wasn't proof enough that things could be beautiful even when the world felt so terribly ugly, Shelby didn't know what was.

Shelby thinks back to her own daughter. She thinks about how good it had felt to be able to finally hold her in her arms after a never-ending night and she thinks about the panic she had felt thinking that she might never get the opportunity to hold her ever again. Like Shelby before, Quinn is now struggling to comprehend what had happened to her tonight while simultaneously struggling to comprehend the idea of losing her child, and while Shelby may not know what it felt like to have to find a way to weasel your way out of a life or death situation, she did understand what it was like to be a mother who wanted nothing more than to protect her child.

Once motherhood struck, it became written in the genetic code. From the moment you first felt that child inside of you, the two of you become a part of each other. If you ever were to lose that child, either at the hands of a monster you once had been foolish enough to trust or into the arms of a set of parents who could give her a world you never could, Shelby knew that you would lose a part of yourself too.

"Growing up sucks, doesn't it?" she asks watching as the blonde snaps her head up curiously. "You start off so innocent, thinking that you can save the world and then you start to get older and you see more and more of the bad in it all and one day you wake up and you realize that you weren't getting rid of the bad things, you were just hoarding them all inside."

Shelby lets out a little laugh although it is not meant to be funny. Quinn must interpret it that way however, because she looks up at Shelby as though she has three heads.

"I don't get you," the blonde finally says.

"What do you mean?" Shelby presses, happy to have at least gotten the girl talking.

"Do you realize everything that happened tonight?" Quinn asks her. "How can you laugh?"

"If I couldn't laugh I think that things would be so much worse, no?" Shelby asks. When the blonde only continues to stare up at her blankly, Shelby sighs, her face falling. "Quinn, you know that what happened tonight was not your fault, right?"

Quinn chokes, sniffling against Shelby's question; the fact that she had even had to ask it and the fact that the answer is obvious without her even saying it.

"I know that I wasn't there tonight," Shelby continues. "I don't know what you girls went through and I probably never will, but I do know that Rachel and Santana really value the friendship that they have with you. I know that they love you and they care about you and they worry about you, and I know that they would never even think to blame you for what happened tonight."

Shelby pauses again, waiting for a response from Quinn. When she still doesn't get one, she realizes that she is going to have to dig even deeper.

"Don't tell them that I told you this, but Santana and Rachel never had a very easy time making friendships stick around," Shelby tells Quinn, whose head cocks up, finally interested. "They weren't comfortable with the idea of it. I think that they're relationship with each other was so strong, they just didn't want to waste the time and energy trying to find another person who could fit so perfectly into their lives. When we moved here, you all sort of just slipped right in like you'd known each other forever. I know that it was a little rough-going at first, but they were new at it and in a way, I think that you were too. The point is, Quinn, that you all went through something awful tonight but what you and Rachel and Santana and Brittany have that Andrew never will is each other. You will come out stronger on the other side every single time."

"What about her?" Quinn asks, her face scrunching as she nods her head to the infant slowly falling asleep inside of Shelby's arms. "I'm about to lose my daughter, Shelby. How am I supposed to come out stronger on the other side of this?"

Shelby watches Quinn's face take a pinched sort of shape as she struggles not to cry. The older woman pauses. She let's Quinn absorb all of these terrible emotions because she knows as well as the young mother in front of her does that when it comes to a child that you have made from scratch, grown inside of you, and nurtured inside your very own arms, sometimes it's hard to remember how lucky you are until it is about to all be taken away.

"Tonight, when I didn't know whether or not Santana and Rachel were even alive, when I didn't know if I would ever see them again, that was the absolute worst feeling I have ever felt in my life," Shelby admits to Quinn, her voice low, eyes heavy. She watches the blonde girl stare at her hard, absorbed by her honesty. "I went back through their entire lives. I thought of every single mistake that I have ever made with them and I begged somebody to transport me back in time so that I might have the opportunity to fix it before it was too late. Do you want to know a little secret, Quinn? Mother to mother?"

The blonde girl nods at Shelby so subtly, she almost misses it

"Every single mother that has ever existed has laid in the exact same position that you are in right now and has asked themselves whether or not they are doing the right thing."

Quinn hesitates for a moment and then, before she can think to stop herself, she asks: "Did you?"

Shelby smiles at Quinn all-knowingly; the answer before it can even leave her lips.

"When Santana was born, I was afraid of everything. Faulty electrical sockets, third story windows, strangers, everything. I never felt that I could ever be good enough for this amazing thing that I was somehow worthy of getting. I kept those fears hoarded up inside of me for a very long time, long after even Rachel was born because other mothers made it look so easy and I was embarrassed that it came so difficult to me."

"I never thought about what would happen after she was born," Quinn finally admits reciprocating Shelby's honesty with a little of her own. "It just hurt too much to do it. I should have known that it would all come back to bite me eventually. It hurts even more now. I don't want to let her go, Shelby. I know that that it's selfish. I know that I have to, but I don't want to."

"You know Quinn, it took me years to figure out that to do right by my girls, I had to come second for everything. My feelings, my opinions, my life, it always had to come after Rachel and Santana's." Shelby shakes her head softly, amazed by the blonde girl, amazed that at sixteen, she could be so strong and so selfless when some people spend their entire lives without ever thinking of anybody other than themselves. "It took me eighteen years to figure that lesson out. You Quinn, figured it out in a couple of months."

Shelby walks over towards Quinn, holding the baby out like an offering. Quinn hesitates for just a fraction of a second but finally holds her arms out, allowing Shelby to pass the tiny baby girl into them where the infant does not fuss once, but simply rolls over against her mother's chest and falls peacefully back to sleep.

Quinn watches the girl; torn between a hopeless sense of pride and amazement and wanting to burst into tears as Shelby rests her hand gently against Quinn's shoulder.

"That right there, that's not selfishness, Quinn," the older woman tells the blonde, staring deep inside of the girl's hazel eyes. "In fact, I do believe that it is the exact opposite."


"There, do you see that smoke?"

Sheriff Walker points out his windshield to guide his driver even though the smoke pluming from just above the distant tree line is hardly inconspicuous.

"It's coming from the direction of the golf course. That must be the car fire. Follow it. It should lead us right to them."

"I'm sorry, did you just say car fire?" The sheriff cringes. An officer who looked as though he was barely out of high school had handed him a cell phone all while begging him to hold the line not even five minutes ago and already, he was prone to forgetting that he was on the phone with Shelby Corcoran.

He knows that protocol would have him hanging up the phone to focus on the crime but for some reason, he can't bring himself to do that. He wonders if it has anything to do with the fact that he can't seem to get his own son – so close in age with the girls who had been affected by tonight – out of his head.

"Mrs. Corcoran, we're just following a tip," he insists and then turns his attention back onto his driver when the kid behind the wheel comes damn near close to driving straight past the scene. "Doug, turn here. Turn here!"

"But it's on the course!" the young man argues.

"I know that it's on the course, just turn the car!" the sheriff orders through gritted teeth. He is sick of being the one who is being ordered around by these younger officers; his subordinates.

The car turns slowly, the tires of the police cruiser hopping the curb with a thud as they pull onto the golf course.

The driver navigates the tricky traps set along the green carefully, as the view of a car that seems to be enveloped in a large ball of flames slowly comes into his view. The closer that they get, he starts to see people scattered about the remains of the vehicle, but it looked as though they were just standing there…

"Do you see anything yet?" he hears a whisper in his ear. He had forgotten that Shelby Corcoran was even there at all.

"Not yet," the sheriff breathes, watching through the mirrors as the rest of the convoy follows his lead onto the golf course, making their way towards the scene with perfect precision. A couple of them flash high beams and spotlights. One of the taller women turns to the scene, blinking up to try and see what is going on.

"Wait, I see somebody," the sheriff tells Shelby, squinting his eyes trying to get a better look. "A blonde woman. She's tall with short hair. Hang on… is that Sue Sylvester?"

"She was watching my girls for the weekend," Shelby confirms, her breath hitched as she waits to see what the man can see of her daughter next, but the man seems distracted by the idea that somebody had trusted Sue Sylvester with their kids for an entire weekend.

"Really?" he asks and listens to the mother scoff at the lack of professionalism.

"Yes, really," she tells the officer, who shakes his head, trying to focus.

"Okay, okay, I see a blonde girl; tall and skinny, probably about seventeen or eighteen. Next to her is a brunette; a tiny little thing. She's wearing gray leggings and a sweater with what looks like an owl or some kind of bird on it."

"That's Rachel," Shelby confirms without skipping a beat. "How does she look? Is she hurt? Is she alright?"

"She looks okay," the sheriff says, squinting his eyes in an effort to get a better look. "She's standing up. All of them are standing over something. I can't tell what they're doing…. Oh, crap."

"What?" Shelby asks through a tight breath. "What is it?"

The sheriff pauses, straining his eyes even harder. He wants to make sure that what he is seeing is correct, he doesn't want to worry the mother over nothing. After a moment however, he realizes that his initial impression had been the right one and that inside of that tiny brunette girl's hand is a pistol, and that pistol is pointing at somebody laying on the ground who the officer hadn't even noticed at first.

Around him, the officers are starting to get out of their cars, surrounding the scene. They keep their distance as per protocol when an active shooter was involved, but the sheriff realizes that they didn't really have any protocol for a frightened fifteen-year-old who has suddenly found herself down range of the entirety of the Allen County SWAT team's arsenal.

"She has a gun," the sheriff tells Shelby.

"I know Andrew has a gun," the mother says. It is clear that she is under the impression that she had heard the sheriff wrong. Or maybe her brain actually had just interpreted his words in the way that she wanted to hear them.

"Not Andrew," the sheriff clarifies. "Rachel. Rachel is the one with the gun."

"What?" the mother shrieks so loud that it hurts the sheriff's ears.

"I think that man – Andrew – he's on the floor. He looks hurt. Rachel is pointing a gun at him. Do you know where she may have gotten it from? Do you have any firearms in your home?"

"No!" Shelby says quickly as if affronted by this accusation, but then she backtracks slightly in a way that tells the sheriff that she is holding onto a little bit more of the truth. "I mean… we used to but we don't anymore. Andrew had the gun. He is the one that brought it with him to the house. That's how he shot Santana. Rachel must have gotten a hold of it somehow… maybe after the accident."

"Don't shoot!" the sheriff hears somebody begging from outside of the car. His eyes dart up to look out the windshield where he spots Sue Sylvester with her hands raised high in the air and a look of desperation on her face. "These girls have been kidnapped. They subdued their attacker. Rachel is acting in self-defense. I saw the entire thing. She is a scared fifteen-year-old girl. Do not shoot her!"

"Sheriff Walker, please talk to me," the man hears Shelby beg and only then does he realize how long he has been quiet for.

"Sue Sylvester seems to think that the girls managed to subdue Andrew by crashing the getaway car. That must be how Rachel got her hands on the gun. Sue says that she is acting in self-defense but Shelby, Andrew is injured on the ground. If Rachel shoots him right now then there is nothing that I will be able to do for her."

A hushed sort of realization from Shelby's end filters through the phone, punching the sheriff inside of his gut.

"Let me talk to her," Shelby finally demands, her voice tight.

"I can't do that," the sheriff shakes his head. If he walked over there, through the line of fire to hand Rachel a cell phone to let her mother talk her down, he would be breaking roughly a thousand rules in the process. It might cost him his job, forget the fact that it was already an election year…

"You don't know what Rachel is like," Shelby insists. "I can calm her down."

"Mrs. Corcoran…"

"My daughter's entire life has been controlled by that man for the last seven months!" Shelby tells him sharply, cutting him off, refusing to take no for an answer. "When he is around, she loses every sense of herself. A bunch of police officer pointing their guns at her and screaming orders at her is not going to help."

"Mrs. Corcoran I'm very experienced-"

"In dealing with fifteen-year-old girls who are trying to decide whether or not to enact revenge against their abuser?" she asks the man, already knowing his answer. When he remains silent, Shelby scoffs, a tone that screams I thought not, and continues. "With all due respect Sheriff Walker, my daughter is not a fragile little girl. She is like this only when he is around. I know how to fix it. Now please, let me talk to her."

The sheriff groans with indecision. Glancing out his windshield once more, he gets a good look at Rachel's face; the way it twitches with fear and gives off nothing but confusion and panic.

"Fine," he hisses into the phone, pulling himself out of the car and into the smoky air of a chaotic evening. Sure, he might lose his job over this, but he was starting to realize that Shelby Corcoran was right and him losing his job would be nothing in comparison to Rachel losing the rest of her life. "I've been looking for a reason for an early retirement anyway."


Shelby leaves Quinn's room to the blonde cradling her daughter and a promise to be back with an update as soon as they hear news on Santana.

Shelby had been hoping to run into Judy and Sue, but she needs to get back to Rachel. She needs to tell the ER staff to call off the search party and she needs to settle herself somewhere Santana's doctors would be able to find her once her oldest daughter is finally out of surgery.

She hadn't left Rachel outside for more than five minutes, but when Shelby slips back into the hallway from Quinn's room, she finds Rachel fast asleep in the chairs where Shelby had left her. Her face is propped up against one of her crutches for support. The tiny girl is snoring like she only ever does when she is truly exhausted and it is starting to make Shelby aware of her own exhaustion.

For a moment, Shelby sits in silence and lets the night close in like a fist around her as she watches her daughter sleep. She realizes here that as big as the universe seemed, she had been the one chosen to be Santana and Rachel's mother and that still had to count for something.

"Rachel, wake up honey." Shelby rouses her daughter after a moment, understanding that if she did not do it now, she would just sit and stare at the girl all night.

She watcher her daughter's dark eyes blink wearily awake. For a half a second, the fog of sleep allows Rachel to completely forget her surroundings and if Shelby had to pinpoint a precise moment in this remarkable evening where her heart felt irreparably broken, it would be the moment that she had to watch all of the weariness and doubt creep right back inside of the tiny muscles around Rachel's eyes and mouth; remembering.

"We're still here?" she asks her mother, her voice foggy.

"I'm afraid so," the mother frowns. She watches Rachel shudder and does not hesitate to shrug out of her jacket and wrap it around her daughter's thin shoulders although she is quite certain that the shiver had nothing to do with a chill. "Now come on, let's get you back down to the ER before you're reported as a missing person. We can wait for news on Santana and you can get some rest.

"I'm not tired," Rachel complains, but she does so through a yawn.

"Sure, Rach," Shelby tells the girl sarcastically, helping Rachel to her feet, helping her struggle through her exhaustion long enough to maneuver the crutches back underneath her armpits.

Shelby watches the girl take a couple of cautious steps forward and then she pauses as if a sudden thought had suddenly struck her and looks behind her over her shoulder.

"Mom?" she asks. "Are you tired?"

Shelby smiles softly at her daughter's concern. She is tired, actually. In fact, she cannot remember another time where she had ever been so bare-bones exhausted in her life, but she has to get Rachel back downstairs and she has to make sure that Santana is going to make it through the night and Shelby knows that she probably wouldn't be able to fall asleep right now even if she tried.

"Not yet, kiddo," she assures her daughter, pressing her hand into the small of Rachel's back, urging her forward as she guides her back downstairs, deeper into the night.