Author's Note: So I hadn't typed a word in five months, but then I remembered that Calliope's actual fanon birthday is August 22, 2023, so I had to write something. It's a day late because life, but then again, this ficlet technically takes place today. Only quickly proofread once, so probably a lot of mistakes.

Set after Watching the World Take on A New Form and between the ficlets Never Nothing Less Than Beautiful and It's Only Just Begun.

You Are Never All Alone

Castles they might crumble
Dreams may not come true
But you are never all alone
Because I will always
Always love you.
~In My Arms, Plumb

Rachel isn't certain what time it is. She only knows that it's brutally late or inhumanly early, depending on one's point of view. Her own view is unblinkingly focused on one very particular point, and she can't be bothered to tear her eyes away and rummage around for her (quite probably dead) phone to check on the official time.

She's exhausted.

So very, very exhausted.

But she can't even think about trying to sleep.

Not now.

Maybe not ever again.

Her mind is spinning and her heart is racing and her stomach is twisting and tripping over itself in unending waves because there is suddenly a whole, entirely helpless little person in the world who wasn't here yesterday and is now completely and utterly the responsibility of one Rachel Barbra Berry Fabray.

Okay, so Quinn shares at least fifty percent of the responsibility, but the point stands.

Rachel is someone's mother—a thing that she very much was not yesterday.

She fully realizes that Quinn would argue this point were she awake to do so, but she's blissfully and deservingly asleep after endless hours of labor, so Rachel wins the argument by default. Oh, she knows that she's been an expectant mother for the past nine months, but expectant is a very important qualifier in this particular instance, and since Quinn was the one who was actually pregnant, Rachel hadn't fully assimilated the reality of the title into her self-identity until today. This is a truth that she has no intention of ever confessing to Quinn, who undoubtedly assumes that Rachel has successfully dealt with all of her initial misgivings about motherhood by now.

Quinn absolutely deserves to believe that Rachel is on the exact same page and paragraph and line and word after everything that she'd gone through to bring their daughter into the world.

Their daughter.

Calliope Alice Fabray.

Rachel is still having more than a little trouble believing that she's real even while she's looking right at her. It feels like a dream—like just yesterday Rachel was only a child herself with dreams too big to contain in her small town existence. Everything that she'd wanted to be and to have was so big and important and floating just beyond her reach, bright in her sight but still far enough away to tease her with unrealized possibilities.

There is nothing unrealized about the newly born baby sleeping in the bassinet in front of her, tiny belly rising and falling with every precious breath she takes. Rachel can still feel the sweet warmth of her little body echoing on the tips of her trembling fingers—the little body that she's so terrified that she'll drop every time she holds her.

There are still some days when Rachel feels like it's a struggle just to make it through unscathed without screwing up her career or her friendships or her marriage or everything she touches, but here she is, with a tiny, helpless daughter who's going to depend on her to know what she's doing for at least the next eighteen years.

It's overwhelming.

It's earth-shaking.

It's absolutely terrifying.

She's as afraid of blinking and having all of this disappear as she is of the hospital sending her off tomorrow with a baby that should definitely require her to have completed some kind of comprehensive training and certification before she's entrusted with her care. Really, every single other job of importance in this world demands years of schooling before one is considered qualified (except for politics, she supposes) but they let anyone at all have a baby!

What if she isn't prepared? What if she sucks at this? What if she takes Calliope out in the winter without a hat or misplaces her at the market or leaves her in a taxi? Quinn will divorce her. She'll lose her wife and her daughter and some anonymous taxi driver will sell her precious baby girl to the highest bidder and one day Rachel will be destitute and alone and some strange woman will show up with her cheekbones and her mouth but not her nose and blame her for every single hard knock in her life and it will be so much worse than the disaster that Rachel had lived with Shelby.

Shelby, who is coming to see her granddaughter tomorrow (or probably today by now) with Beth, because they're family, and they both want to meet this perfect baby girl that Rachel had somehow had a part in making despite her own flaws and imperfections, so maybe she won't completely screw this up.

Maybe she's just having a mild panic attack born from exhaustion after the post-birth adrenaline crash in a too quiet hospital room.

Her eyes drift away from Calliope for only a moment, seeking out the sleeping form of her wife in the nearby bed. Quinn is resting on her back with one hand on the curve of her no-longer-quite-as-swollen belly and the other flung out over the edge of the narrow mattress. Her sleepshirt is askew, the loose collar gaping over one pale shoulder, and her face is turned ever-so-slightly towards Rachel, a faint patch of moonlight (or possibly the streetlight) painting her with an ethereal glow. She's so very lovely, even in her exhaustion, and Rachel is in complete awe of her and the miracle that she'd brought into the world.

Her attention returns to said miracle, and the twisting and tripping of her internal organs continues, but this time it feels more like gravity, tugging her into permanent orbit around this one, precious little life.

Her gaze roams helplessly over her daughter's every feature. Her silky dark hair is currently hidden beneath the pink cap on her head, save for a few errant curls escaping at her temples. The tips of her ears are tucked under the cap, and her bowed lips are just barely parted over her dimpled chin. Delicate eyelids are drawn over soft gray eyes, and Rachel wonders again what color they'll eventually become. She can't help hoping for hazel despite the heavy odds against it. Quinn insists that Calliope looks exactly like Rachel, and in these dark, quiet moments, Rachel can't really disagree. There are subtle differences, of course—thank Barbra for the nose!—but her fathers have shown off her own baby pictures often enough in her twenty-eight and half years of life for her to recognize the resemblance. This is her child.

Rachel is Calliope's mother, and no amount of self-doubt or second guessing or unwelcome panic attacks will ever change that.

She'll never want to change it, no matter how much it terrifies her.

"Your mother is a big, ridiculous mess," she whispers so very quietly, wary of waking either of her girls. She rests her hand on the edge of the bassinet, barely resisting the urge to touch her sleeping daughter. "And she…I…am going to make so many mistakes, but I love you with all of my heart." She smiles tenderly down at Calliope. "My little star. I promise you that you will never, ever be alone." Losing the battle to keep her hands to herself, she carefully lays a gentle palm over her daughter's swaddled body, sighing in contentment when she feels the reassuring rise and fall of her breath.

Of course, it proves to be the first one of those many mistakes she's going to be making, because Calliope's eyes flutter open and her little brow scrunches up in puzzled annoyance right before those perfect bowed lips part wider to voice her displeasure at being so rudely woken up.

Rachel's eyes widen in alarm. "Oh, no," she frets, still whispering despite Calliope's stuttering cries. She gently rubs her daughter's chest, but that only seems to make her unhappier. "Oh, crap." Instinct drives her to reach further into the bassinet and carefully lift the squirming baby into her arms, immediately cradling her against her chest in the hope of quieting her down before she wakes up Quinn. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Shh. It's okay, baby girl. Go back to sleep."

"Is she hungry again?" comes a sleep-heavy rasp.

Rachel silently cringes, ashamed to have played a role in waking her exhausted wife. The grown-up, responsible, motherly thing to do, obviously, is to confess to having disrupted Calliope with her obsessive fretting, apologize profusely, and urge Quinn back to sleep while she calms down their daughter. Calliope is already beginning to quiet even as Rachel thinks it. But since it can't be proven without a doubt that Calliope is not, in fact, hungry again, Rachel decides that maybe this unfortunate snafu can be their little secret.

So she turns to Quinn with a sheepish grin and shrugs. "She won't say."

The corner of Quinn's mouth quirks into a tired smile, and she reaches out a hand. "Come here."

Rachel obediently does as instructed, guilt be damned. "We woke up mommy," she murmurs to her daughter, confessing without confessing.

"I imagine this is only the first of many times," Quinn muses, blinking away the remains of sleep as she pushes herself up higher on the inclined bed. Rachel hums in agreement and carefully sits next to Quinn with her precious cargo, all too aware of her wife's searching gaze. "Did you manage to sleep at all?" Quinn asks with only a hint of suspicion.

"Does staring at her in a daze for hours count as sleeping?"

Quinn huffs out a quiet laugh. "No."

"Then, no," Rachel admits.

Quinn leans into her side, bumping her shoulder before sliding an arm beneath Rachel's careful grip. "Let's see if she's looking for her first two o'clock feeding."

"Is that what time it is?" Rachel wonders distantly, ninety percent of her attention on the careful transfer of her newborn daughter into her other mother's arms.

"I don't know. You're the one who's been awake all this time," Quinn chides good-naturedly.

"I wasn't watching the clock," she mutters in embarrassment, more interested in watching Quinn cradle their daughter to her chest before she tugs aside the cotton of her sleep shirt to expose her breast. The last chirps of Calliope's irritation fall silent as she seems to sense where she is and exactly who's holding her and why. A moment later, she finds the nipple that Quinn is offering to her and latches on.

Rachel catches her lower lip between her teeth, lost in the wonder of seeing them both this way. Quinn hisses out a breath that turns into a chuckle. "Looks like she's hungry after all. Guess you're off the hook for waking her up with your incredibly sweet though poorly timed oath."

Rachel's eyes fly to her wife's knowing gaze. "You heard me?"

"I heard you," she confirms with a soft smile.

"But you were sleeping."

"Dozing," Quinn corrects, her smile turning slightly rueful. "I'm so tired, but I can't seem to stop listening for her, even in my sleep." Her gaze falls back to their daughter, and she sighs. "I…I think maybe something in me needs to make sure she's really here."

Tenderness washes over Rachel at the confession. "She's really here." It occurs to her that Quinn might be doing her own obsessive fretting; she's just much better at hiding it behind a stoic demeanor. "And she's ours," Rachel assures her wife, curling an arm around her waist. "No one will ever take her away from us."

Quinn's smile trembles around the edges and her hazel eyes grow misty. "And she'll never, ever be alone," she murmurs, echoing Rachel's earlier vow.

Rachel realizes that it's true for all of them. If she ever tries to take Calliope out into the cold without a hat, Quinn will remember one and remind her, and Quinn will never allow her to leave their daughter in a taxi cab. And even if Rachel gets motherhood wrong more often than she gets it right, she's certain that Calliope will let them both know exactly what she needs from them—very, very loudly. "We're all in this together."

"I swear, if you start singing from High School Musical right now," Quinn warns, more amused than menacing.

Rachel laughs, hugging her wife closer as she continues to watch her nurse their daughter. "I'm too exhausted to remember the words."

"Hear that, Calliope?" Quinn coos. "Your mama is too tired to sing. Less than half a day old and you're already accomplishing the impossible."

"I'm also too exhausted to take offense at your teasing." With her free hand, Rachel traces a gentle fingertip over Calliope's cheek. "And I won't deny that our daughter is exceptional." She's the sun and the moon and all the stars in the sky.

Quinn rests her head against Rachel's shoulder. "Yeah, she really is. She gets it from you."

Something inside of Rachel finally settles in that moment, with Quinn warm and sleepy at her side, holding their daughter in her arms. This is real, and it's hers, and it won't always be perfect but it will always be true. Her family, built on a foundation of love and forgiveness and unshakeable support. They're everything that she needs, and she will do everything in her power to meet their every need in return.

Even if it means that she never sleeps again.