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Rachel is really, really excited for her first day of high school. It's the one day she's been waiting for all her life—at least the only day she's willingly admitted to her dads she's been looking forward to all summer, longer than that. Finn's picking her up to catch the bus with her, and then she'll finally get to start training to be a heroine like her dads and her biological mom. She's completely prepared for this: she has her outfit picked out, a preppy pink shirt and a gray tweed skirt that says fun but not unsophisticated, maybe a little bit quirky, and her schedule and calendar are up to date, and she has all these new awesome notebooks that she can't wait to break in already.

Now, if only her powers would show up, that would probably cancel out the feeling of nausea she's had to hide for the past week. And it's hard to hide how sick you're feeling when your parents are constantly hovering over you, asking if you're all right, if you'll be okay at Sky High or you don't know if you're ready for superhero school yet, even though there's nothing Rachel can do about that. She has to go. Her tuition's all paid for and she has her outfit picked out and it's her destiny, it's what she was born to do, saving the world.

She just has no idea how she's going to do that if she can't even figure out what her powers are. But maybe they'll do that at school. Maybe she's the normal one, and Finn's the freak for having been able to use his power since he was six. After all, Finn's power isn't really that exciting. Maybe the good ones—and with three hero parents like Rachel's, hers must be really good—show up later, when you won't accidentally maim yourself with them. Rachel likes her limbs a lot, so she'd appreciate the universe's perfectly crafted plan if that was the case.

But what if it isn't?

"Rachel?" her dad says, accompanying her name by a gentle knock on the door. "Honey, Finn's here. He's waiting for you downstairs."

Rachel sighs, using a blue marker to cross off another day in the calendar on her wall. She's had a pink marker waiting to be used since she was nine, but she's saving it for when she gets her powers. Which at this rate might be never. But no pessimism, that's not good. Someone at Sky High will know what to do.

"I'll be down in a minute," Rachel yells back, and the door opens just slightly. Her dad—Steve, Rock Ant, the one who has super-strength, the one everyone thinks Rachel takes after just because he's Jewish and she's Jewish, but that's ridiculous, because her mom is Jewish too, and sometimes children of parents of different races turn out to be one of the two races instead of something in between. Rachel doesn't know who her biological dad is, and she likes it that way. Besides, maybe something weird happened with their mixed sperm and she has three powers, which would be awesome, and might explain why they haven't showed up yet: three powers is a lot of powers to throw on a child—pops his head in.

"You all right?" he asks, and she nods enthusiastically, and he adds, "I'm so excited for you. You're gonna love it at Sky High." He sighs. "Those were some of my best years."

Rachel tries to smile, hoping her dad will blame his school stories for the contrivance of her gesture, and he nods and leaves her alone to worry some more. She can't even lift her desk high enough to move it without scratching the floor. Her dad told her his own superstrength grew gradually, but Rachel isn't even normal strong. She's little girl strong. And she can't jump high at all, either—the other kids in middle school always laughed at her because she kept falling in mud puddles in gym class—though her other dad, John, the one who can fly, told her that his power sort of appeared overnight, which makes Rachel feel a little better.

Still worried, though.

When she gets to the kitchen, Finn's sitting at the table, snacking on oatmeal and apples from the tree he gave Rachel's dads last year for their anniversary. Neither of them is any good at gardening, and Rachel knows that tree would be dead if it wasn't for Finn coming by every day to take care of it.

And see Rachel, but mostly take care of the tree. Finn is really obsessive about nature, and Rachel isn't going to kid herself that Finn really wants to talk to her every single day. Rachel is not that kind of girl—the kind that makes herself believe her crush totally loves her back even though there's no good reason to think that—and she's proud of that. She hears her mom could be really overbearing, and believe she was being proposed to when her boyfriend was trying to break up with her because he'd realized he was gay, but it is obviously not a genetic trait.

"Hi," she says, a little less confidently than she intended. God, why Finn? And why now? As if her lack of powers wasn't enough to have her reeling, she has to get a crush on her best friend, who's been nothing but nice to her since he rescued her from death by slushie in the second grade, an incident Rachel would rather not revisit.

"Hey," Finn says around his mouthful of cereal. "The bus is—" he begins, but then the bus pulls into the curb with a loud screech and he shrugs. "—here."

"I heard," Rachel says, and hops forward to hug her dad John before Finn and she get out of the house. They're walking so close their hands are almost touching, and Rachel wonders if it would be a bad move to just hold his hand. She's read in a few places that the right thing in this situation is telling your friend how you really feel, and whether he feels the same way or not, if he's a good friend, he won't freak out and abandon you. Holding his hand would be a nice, straight-forward, no-"that's not what I meant"-explanations way of letting him know.

She's about to do it when the door to the bus draws open and the bus driver urges them in. "It's rush hour, kids, get moving," he says, hand drawn to see their student cards. He lets Finn in without any ado, but when he sees Rachel's card, he whistles. "Rachel Berry, huh? That was a real scandal. The press went nuts. A superheroine carrying the child of an ex that she'd never get back together with? And then there was all that same-sex couple business. Your dad almost had to retire." She's ready to defend her honor when the driver offers her a business card and says, "But here you are, healthy as a button and God knows how powerful. Call me if you need a ride. All hours, all destinations, Miss Berry. I aim to help."

Rachel grins and takes the card—Ken Tanaka, bus driver—even though accepting it is a lot like lying about having any powers in the first place. But she's lied to her dads for years, so she figures a bus driver won't make that big a difference in her karma points.

Everyone on the bus looks at her as she turns around, and a girl with green highlights offers up her seat, pushing her friend aside to do the same. Her friend says, "But it's just one person," and green highlights says, "But she'll want to sit with her boyfriend," and Rachel feels Finn stiffen behind her. Finn's just not ready for that sort of thing. It was good the bus driver interrupted her when she was going to blurt out how she felt.

"Oh, he's not—he's not my boyfriend," Rachel says, nervously looking at Finn, whose face is pretty much blank. It's hard to tell anything when he looks like that. "But don't worry about it," Rachel says, and makes her way down the bus until she finds an empty seat. Finn takes the one across the aisle from her, and the doors close and the bus starts moving.

It's a really normal yellow school bus, to Rachel's surprise, just like the one that used to take her to middle school in the city. It picks a few more kids up in Rachel's neighborhood, none of them nearly as important as Rachel, and for a moment Rachel kind of wishes there was someone who outshone her here, just in case.

But that's pessimism, and pessimism does not become a girl like her.

*
The bus isn't actually a common school bus. Like everything else in Rachel's life, it hides behind a normal façade and pops out plane wings when no one—when they take a turn into a closed road and the driver keeps going faster and faster—is watching. The seats sprout off high-security belts like Finn makes flowers grow out of the earth and they're flying, so fast it's a little terrifying, and not in the good, rollercoaster kind of way. It mostly just adds to her nausea, and when they get to the school—supported by an enormous platform in the middle of the sky—and she looks around, she's not the only one who's a little green in the face.

"Don't worry, kids, you'll get used to it," Ken says, grinning like he actually enjoys making freshmen suffer by pulling flying bus tricks on them without warning. Rachel's not sure whether that's a hundred percent bad or she might able to use it as an excuse when the other kids ask about her powers.

They don't, though, astonished as they are by all the kids doing crazy stuff in the courtyard. There's a ridiculously well-tanned girl who's multiplied herself to do a cheer routine involving miniature pyramids with this other blonde with perfectly groomed bangs who runs fast and jumps higher. Another blonde, one with her hair brushed and tied back, is directing them, occasionally freezing them in place when, Rachel assumes, they move out of the allotted space for their choreography. It's frustrating not being able to tell whether her power is stopping people in time or actually freezing them, but one of tan girl's multiplications receives a blow and then seems to thaw under the vertical movement of ponytail girl's hand, so Rachel gets her answer.

"That's Quinn Fabray," someone whispers to Rachel's left, and she jumps before turning around to face that voice. It's a tall, half-Asian girl wearing a beanie and all-black clothes, with purple highlights in her hair. "Daughter of Countess Crusade?" the girl continues, except her stuttering makes it sound like there are fifteen 'k' sounds in the phrase—and then Rachel's eyes widen. "That's the supervillainess your dad p-p-put in jail ten years ago, isn't it? You're—you're Rachel Berry, right?"

Rachel nods. "That's me," she says with a shrug. So much for her vow of confidence.

"Do you know your p-p-powers yet?" the girl asks, and Rachel considers telling her the truth. Quinn Fabray doesn't look like the kind of person who might be willing to talk things through with Rachel. She seems more like the kind of girl who will make her high school experience a living hell for something Rachel had nothing to do with—but fully supports; it's not her fault Quinn's mom decided to use her powers for evil. But if Quinn has something against Rachel, Rachel could use as many people as possible on her side. Especially what with her not having grown into her hero-ness yet.

Rachel gives a small smile and a shrug. "Of course," she says instead, nodding.

"Cool," the girl says, but before she asks anything else, they're pulled into a circle by the blonde girl with bangs who was doing cheer moves just a second earlier.

"Freshmen," the girl says, but it doesn't sound derogative in her voice. She's smiling warmly and chewing gum super fast. Rachel doesn't want to know how much money her parents spend in snacks if she always eats like that. "I'm Brittany, student body president, and I'm happy to see you all made it here in one piece. If you'll follow me," she says, and takes them all to the gym, where they're given a quick welcome-to-Sky-High speech by the Principal, a retired Indian hero with the ability to create and dissolve sandstorms—Rachel read about it on the school website, which only fails to mention that the school is up here in the clouds—and then a long, loud reverberating noise booms through the gym, making the windows physically tremble.

Like sheep, everyone turns around to see where it comes from. Rachel feels like she just participated in a cheer, one of the lowest forms of art, in Rachel's opinion, and will bust herself for it later.

"Children," a tough woman with badly-dyed blonde spiky hair and an all-green tracksuit says—yells, really, and Rachel feels a sort of admiration for her for being able to hold everyone's attention like this.

People only ever looked at Rachel when her competitive streak shone through during ballet lessons, and tennis lessons, and yogalates lessons meant to control her competitive streak. If her dads didn't want her to be competitive, they wouldn't have signed her up for all those things in the first place. She knows they're proud despite the yogalates. She knows that was just their way of dealing with the PTA in Rachel's middle school. It wasn't Rachel's fault little Amber had gotten hurt, but her dad thought she was showing signs of superstrength, and her other dad decided it would be best if they pretended she was a little out of control emotionally, so no one would suspect they were anything other than really good real estate agents.

"I'm Coach Sue Sylvester, but you may call me Sue. Unless you're a sidekick, in which case that privilege will automatically be revoked, and using my first name will land you in detention." She adds, "Sorry," but she doesn't sound sorry at all. She pulls a remote control out of her pocket, and a platform with a small staircase on the side grows out of the gym floor. "To decide how you will refer to me, you will get on this platform and show me what you can do. If you feel you've been wrongly assigned to one side or another, save it. Trust me, you're wrong, and you will just be wasting both my time and your dignity."

A few whispers run around Rachel, and she feels her chest tighten. She thought she'd have more time to come into her powers. Maybe the lack of gravity would help, or the height, or the altered levels of oxygen. This is freaking her out. Deep breath, deep breath, let it out.

"All right," Coach Sylvester says, looking at her clipboard. "Tina Cohen-Chang, you're up first."

Tina manages to stutter out that she's a shapeshifter, but can only turn into an adorable yet useless black ferret. If that was Rachel's power, she would have bitten Coach Sylvester until she agreed to put her in the hero class, but Tina is too shy or too anxious to think of that, so she ends up in the sidekick side.

The rest of it goes by pretty fast, though Rachel isn't sure if that's because it's cool to see people's powers or because, for once in her life, she's not looking forward to getting up on a stage. Kurt Hummel, a small boy with perfect hair and a gummy mouth, melts into a puddle of goo on the floor, which isn't a very offensive power either. Noah Puckerman—"Puck," he corrects, and throws the coach a flirty smile before she can say she'll call him whatever she wants to, which makes Rachel's blood boil—flexes his arms—so inappropriate. Why is no one calling him on it?—and turns into an enormous rock monster.

"We've got ourselves a rockafella," Coach Sylvester says with a smirk, and points Puck towards the other side of the bleachers. And anyway, what kind of order is this? It's definitely not alphabetical. This is such a travesty.

Artie Abrams, a kid in a wheelchair, gets made fun of, first, and then astonishes people by simply saying, "Technopath," and turning his wheelchair into a giant robot. Coach Sylvester gives him a thumbs up, and then sends him to sidekicks because the robot doesn't do anything that would have a point in a fight or rescue people. "I don't have the right pieces," Artie says, but it doesn't make a difference.

Mercedes Jones burns the tips of Coach Sylvester's hair but gets into the hero class, which seems to increase everyone else's confidence. Tina really should have bit her after all. Finn is next, and Rachel squeezes his side and wishes him luck, though he totally doesn't need it. He hasn't used his power in a fight since people got the point that they shouldn't throw their drinks at Rachel unprovoked, but it's definitely got offensive potential.

"Can you do anything useful with that?" Coach Sylvester yells after Finn makes a tree from the courtyard grow a circle of branches around the platform. Finn looks pretty taken aback for a moment, and then he makes one of the big boughs sprout out a thin branch that immobilizes Coach Sylvester and half-asses an attempt to strangle her. "Here-oh," Coach Sylvester croaks out, and Finn lets her go. "Do that again and you'll land yourself in detention," but Finn shrugs—Coach Sylvester did ask, after all, Rachel thinks—and makes a beeline for the bleachers.

And then it's Rachel's turn. Deep breath, deep breath, let it out.

*
It goes horribly wrong.

By which she means, it doesn't go at all. Coach Sylvester makes a big show of her parentage and how everyone's been waiting to find out which power or powers she's inherited, and then almost crushes Rachel with a car falling from the ceiling. She gets out unscratched because she's always had quick reflexes, born out of a need to duck out of incoming flying objects thrown by other kids in school, but she can't do anything. Can't fly, can't uproot buildings, can't stop time or move things with her mind or turn into animals.

The only thing she can do is panic, which always ends the same way: she breaks out into song. Coach Sylvester waits and interrupts her halfway through the second verse, when it becomes obvious that her voice doesn't have hypnotic effects or deafens people or does anything other than sound.

"You're wasting my time, Rachel Berry," Coach Sylvester says, looking angry. Then she yells, "Sidekick," and it's so loud that it makes Rachel bounce and fall right next to Tina Cohen-Chang, who, surprisingly, places a comforting hand on her knee and says, "Don't worry, nerves can do that sometimes. They'll correct the mistake when you're ready to show 'em."

At least Finn doesn't ditch her for his new non-sidekick peers the minute they step out of the gym, which is nice.

"It's gonna happen," Finn says, sounding pretty confident. It puts Rachel in a much brighter mood.

"It has to, right? I have three hero parents. Even if two canceled each other out, I'd have another one to make the balance positive. I have to have a power."

"That's not really how it works," Finn says, like he always does, and Rachel nods because she knows. Still, they have superpowers. It's totally possible for science to work in ways they weren't taught in middle school, like how the very building they're in is suspended in the air by an anti-gravity mechanism. "But the way it does work, you'll totally have a power. Maybe if you get yourself in a situation when you have to. Hey, maybe when you tell your dads that you're in side—I mean, in Hero Support class—maybe then you'll realize you can like, vanish into thin air, or teleport or something. Make the earth swallow you."

"That's your power, Finn," Rachel points out.

"In a way that doesn't involve tree roots breaking through the floor," Finn explains.

Rachel smiles. Finn just looks so sure that she'll get her power, it's hard not to be a little moved by it. He's so eager to find out, too. It doesn't make being Hero Support any easier on her, but at least she knows she'll have Finn to say the right thing and be sweet and maybe grow her some strawberries. That's the cool thing about Finn—you can have fresh fruit of any kind even when it's not the season for it.

It kind of helps, at least until her first class begins and she recognizes their teacher, which means she's not going to be able to keep this from her dads for long.

*
"Welcome to Hero Support, guys. I'm Emma Pillsbury, and I'll be your teacher for the year, or until one of you does something wrong and puts me on bed rest. Please keep in mind, however, that if you do that, Coach Sylvester will be taking over the class."

Rachel crouches into her seat. Emma's the college reporter who did Rachel's dads coming-out story a few years after her biological mom's big scandal, when Rachel was old enough that most of her features were already in their permanent place, and there's no way Emma won't recognize her nose, let alone her name.

"Rachel Berry," Emma reads, like clockwork, and seems to lighten up. "I didn't expect to see you here. Haven't talked to your parents in a while."

Rachel breathes a sigh of relief. That means she'll have some extra time to break it to them. Or maybe less, if Emma's smile and the fact that she actually says, in front of the whole class, that she misses them is anything to go by.

"What power did you inherit?" Emma asks, confused. She's probably wondering why the information hasn't gotten to her yet. Apparently, in this school, Rachel's already famous, which would normally make her pretty happy, but this time it just means a lot of people get to see her fail.

"I don't know yet," Rachel replies, as dignified as she can manage. Head high, voice firm.

"Late bloomer?"

Rachel perks up. "Are there a lot of those?"

"A few," Emma says. "My first-year class three, two years ago was full of them. That's why there's no junior Hero Support class. Big miscalculation. The three leftover sidekicks sort of just quit after everyone else got transferred. I tried to convince them to stay, because really, guys, Hero Support is very, very important. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They always try to make us guys feel worthless, but the truth is, the one they don't want you to know, is a lot of heroes, without us, would be dead by now."

"Right," someone in the back spits out.

"Very right, yes," Emma continues. "So even if we lose Rachel Berry halfway through the semester, remember that all of you have useful powers that deserve care and cultivating—"

"Cut that crap out, flower guy got in the hero class," the same voice says, and Rachel hopes Emma will call him on it, but instead she turns to Rachel and freaking beams.

"Finn is here, too? That's lovely," Emma muses. "I remember when you two were kids and I had to keep him from growing roses where he'd end up getting stabbed by the thorns." Emma was also Finn's babysitter until he turned ten. There's just no way around this. If she tells Finn's parents, they'll tell Rachel's in a split second.

The rest of the class is all right, kind of interesting. Rachel didn't know so many heroes would get injured because they refused any unsolicited help from their sidekicks. She could have used a lecture like this in middle school, because it's basically Jocks 101: How to Feed the Popular Kids' Egos So They Won't Take Their Inferiority Complex Out On You. It's really validating, socially speaking. Emma always had a knack for finding the right perspective to approach anything, from informing the world that the superhero that had put the horrible Countess Crusade in jail was gay to getting Finn to eat his Brussels sprouts. You'd think someone with a power like Finn's would be more appreciative of nature, but if it wasn't for Rachel, he would have wasted it for years and years. It would have been really tragic.

The point is, Hero Support is really not that bad, which sort of makes Rachel feel better about telling her parents. They'll be disappointed, but it's not forever. She'll probably come into her powers in a month or two. A semester or something. And she'll be a better hero for having taken a sidekick class. That's a plus, right?

Besides, she has to tell them before Emma does. Rachel isn't that good a liar. One thing is refraining from blurting the truth out, and another thing is denying it to her dads' faces or making believe she has powers when it's obvious that she doesn't.

Yet.

She's holding on really tight to that 'yet'.

*
By the end of lunchtime, what she's holding on to is the possibility of skipping this semester altogether.

"But Miss Firefly is really nice," Kurt says, confused, around a mouthful of raw carrot from the plant that Finn just grew next to their table. Rachel is impossibly happy he's sticking with her, but she does her best not to show it, because she doesn't want to give off a clingy vibe.

"I can't believe you guys have my nanny as your teacher," Finn says, genuinely jealous. It's pretty cute. "She's really as nice as you think she is. Man, I loved it when she just glowed until I fell asleep. Those were the times."

"I'm just saying," Rachel says, a little louder, "that my parents are really invested in my future as a hero. Taking a sidekick class might just set me back, or make me comfortable so that my powers will never be brought to light because they're not deemed necessary. And they are, they're very necessary. It's hard to think about this, but eventually my parents will be too old to do their job, and it will be my duty to pick up where they left off. No one but me is eligible for that job: I have the DNA and the trainers and all the background."

Mercedes scowls at her. Rachel's already categorized that look as 'bitch, please' with a side of 'if you weren't so freaking eager, I would be glad to take offense in what you just said'. Her face probably got tired of looking like that at everyone in hero class, and that's why she's sitting with the sidekicks. Rachel sees no other explanation for it.

"Besides, the hero class?" Finn adds casually. "Chock-full of potential popular kids. With powers. My tree-growing abilities won't be able to save you from their magical slushies."

Rachel glares at him, because he's not supposed to mention that. Everyone sitting at the table nods in understanding, though. She's not only a sidekick, but she's at the bottom of the social hierarchy, again. She doesn't get why Finn puts up with this. She feels so warm about it, though, like she's being hugged.

"—wait," she says, wary. She is being hugged.

She's being hugged by a long elastic arm coming from the other side of the cafeteria—the one where Quinn Fabray and her cheerleader friends sit. So maybe not hugged. Maybe squeezed to death. "I can't breathe," she says, trying to yank the arm off her stomach. Quinn and her tanned friend are laughing themselves to death with this. Brittany at least has the decency to look ashamed.

After that, who the arm belongs to isn't even relevant. It's a boy, a minion, whatever. It's Quinn who has a problem with Rachel, Quinn Rachel is going to have to deal with.

The arm withdraws before she turns purple, and when Rachel looks up, Quinn, Brittany and their friend are standing at the end of the sidekicks' table, looking down at them.

"Leave them alone," Finn says. Rachel's always admired that in him, how he can just tell anyone off and look like he's not afraid of them. Like he doesn't care what they think. "Brit, I thought it was your job to keep these things from happening."

Brittany looks down and mutters an apology. She looks nothing like the girl who took them all to the gym with a wide grin on her face. It's kind of sad.

"Oh, don't be such bad sports," Quinn says. "Santana here just thought it would be a good way to break you guys in. No harm meant."

"You almost choked me," Rachel blurts out.

"Almost," Quinn echoes. "Always almost. Remember that. Or, I guess you'll remember anyway, since my mom almost made you an orphan." She perks up. "Great talking to you," she adds, and she plucks a ripe apple from the plant near Finn's chair before walking off with her entourage.

Rachel thinks that's supposed to be comforting, but Quinn makes it sound like a threat. Like they're never going to hurt Rachel permanently, but they're going to do their best to make her suffer.

"Did Santana just pull an eyelash drop on you?" Kurt asks Finn. Finn frowns. "Eyelash drop," Kurt repeats, and reenacts it, describing it as he goes, "Lock of hair behind the ear, look down, bat eyelashes, offer small smile, look away coyly aaand turn around like it was an accident."

"She was flirting with you," Artie says, sounding excited. Rachel's heart drops. Finn's a great friend, but she can't compete with someone like Santana in the girlfriend department. Not if she can't get herself to tell him about her feelings. He's obviously never going to see what's right in front of him if he doesn't know it's available and willing.

"She was?" Finn says.

"Of course she was," Mercedes says. "You're a hero and you're wasting your time with a bunch of sidekicks. They need to recruit you somehow."

"That looked like a different kind of recruiting to me," Kurt says, raising a meaningful eyebrow.

"Whatever," Rachel interrupts, but Finn's staring dreamily at the door Santana just walked through. Rachel doesn't have time to worry about that. "How do I break this to my parents?"

"Just tell them you don't have your powers yet," Artie offers. "They're Rapids and Rock Ant, they'll understand."

Rachel doesn't mention that's another thing she's afraid of. She doesn't want her parents to stop expecting great things from her.

"And if everything else fails: girl, you can sing," Kurt adds, and everyone nods in agreement.

Rachel can't help breaking into a smooth, bright smile. That's exactly how you take a girl's mind off the things she doesn't want to dwell on.

*
As far as dreaded moments go, this one doesn't feel as awful as her placement test. Mercedes, Tina, Artie and Kurt are studying in the living room, which feels like support, and Finn is standing in the hallway, pretending to look for something in his coat, so he'll be able to open up the earth to swallow Rachel if she gives him the secret signal. That's a real friend, Rachel thinks proudly. She tried to tell her parents when she got home from school earlier, but she chickened out. If she chickens out now, one of the sidekicks—or Finn, or Mercedes, or one of Artie's devices—will blab. They shook on it, and Artie programmed two of his robots.

"Dad, Dad," she greets her parents, "I have something to tell you."

They wait.

"Idon'thavemypowersyet," she says quick, like pulling off a band-aid, and lets out a deep breath.

There's a moment of silence, and then her dad Steve says, blinking, "You don't?"

Her dad John, Rapids, shakes his head and smiles reassuringly, and opens his arms so Rachel can burrow her face in his chest and be hugged. Her dad John gives the best hugs. Her dad Steve tends to hurt her a little, but it's not his fault he's super strong. "Why didn't you tell us, honey?" her dad John says.

"I just didn't want to disappoint you guys," she sobs, and feels her dad Steve's hand trailing through her hair comfortingly. "I was hoping they'd pop up before I got to school, but they didn't, and what if they never do, what if I just wasted your DNA forever? The world will be deprived of the best superhero ever." She sniffs.

"It's okay, baby," her dad John says, "you'll get them soon enough. Powers don't just skip generations. They're powers. They're dominant genes."

Rachel nods, vaguely aware that she's spreading her tears—and snot—all over her dad John's shirt. Her dad Steve keeps stroking her head, and then he says, "We've sheltered her too much."

"Don't say that."

"But we have. If we hadn't, she would've already had a big moment of 'I need to hit someone to get everyone to respect me, and hit them hard', and she would have broken that jock's nose. But instead she had Finn growing and squishing raspberries over people's heads."

"And how do you propose we get her flying?" John says sarcastically. "Throw her off the roof?"

"You can be there to pick her up."

"I can do that," Rachel says, rubbing the tears from her eyes.

"Don't be stupid," her dad John says, but she's already climbing the stairs two steps at a time.

The portion of roof outside Rachel's bedroom window isn't really far from the ground, but the jump is poorly thought out, the execution atrocious, and the landing a catastrophe.

That's how Rachel breaks her arm and ends up first in the emergency room, and then in the nurse's office early in the morning the next day, because she's the only one who can mend her radius in time for Mad Science For Sidekicks class.

*
There are eight different stories about how Rachel broke her arm circulating around the school by third period. They range from the ridiculous to the conspiratorial, from falling off the side of the school platform to Quinn freezing her arm and crushing it with a sledgehammer while it was still an ice cube. People are whispering about it when Quinn walks into the cafeteria, and for days afterwards; by Friday, there are shadows under Quinn's eyes from—worrying, Rachel assumes. She's not sure what Quinn is worried about, why she's not facing people in the hallways or directing Santana's impromptu cheerleading routines, but she leaves Rachel alone, so Rachel's not about to meddle.

Besides, Quinn Fabray is Countess Crusade's daughter. Rachel knows better than to get in the way of someone with the amount of pent-up resentment and anger Quinn must carry around for her.

*
The peace lasts three weeks. Everyone's forgotten Rachel Berry even exists, and they have better things to worry about than a made-up rumor about a student injuring another, like the Homecoming Dance. As student body president, Brittany is in charge of the school events committee, which means she's constantly busy and leaves each subsection of the aforementioned committee to fend by themselves. And Rachel didn't know Brittany exerted such a calming force on Quinn and Santana, but it becomes obvious when Rachel reaches out for a tiny apple from the miniature tree Finn's grown next to Tina's seat and the tree turns a bluish color before melting into a cold puddle of withered leaves.

"Don't think I've forgotten about you," Quinn says with a bright, fake grin on the way to her table.

Finn stands up and says, "I'm going to go talk to her," and Rachel almost doesn't have time to clutch his arm and stop him.

"That won't do me any good, Finn," she says, eyes wide and honest.

"I agree with her," Mercedes mentions. "That will only make them angrier."

Finn looks at the rest of their table expectantly, so Rachel ups the puppy-dog look. Her features are too bold to get the full effect, but Finn's face falls and he goes back to his chair.

"What is her problem?" Finn asks, like he genuinely doesn't know why anyone would be mean to someone like Rachel. Sometimes Rachel thinks Finn hasn't processed a single minute of the past seven years. It's not hard to figure out why Quinn doesn't like having Rachel around. It would be easy even if Rachel's dad hadn't sent Quinn's mom to solitary. Everyone sitting at a sidekick table—everyone but Finn—could make a list of reasons, even the ones who haven't exchanged a single word with Rachel. It is, after all, their cross to bear—not Finn's.

"I still think you guys," Kurt says, gesturing at Finn and Mercedes, "should try to use your powers for good."

Finn frowns. "You're eating the fruit of me using my power for good."

Kurt chuckles and shakes his head. "No, I mean your status. Most of us are measly sidekicks, but you guys are officially heroes. You could easily get invited to Santana's pre-homecoming party if you tried to mingle with your equals."

"Kurt," Mercedes says firmly, staring at him, "why would I want to go to a party where everyone thinks I should stop seeing my friends?"

It seems to take Kurt a while to realize Mercedes just referred to him as a friend, but, when he does, Rachel sees the same relief that's flooding through her reflected on his face. Finn is the only real friend Rachel's ever had, the only one who didn't deflect to her because no one else would sit with them at lunch or who befriended her so they could hurt her even worse, but not everyone's had a Finn. Some people have only ever had little Ambers with their little pigtails and their mean schemes.

"Kurt has a point, though," Finn says, sounding surprised. Probably by the fact that he's come up with something, which Rachel finds adorable. "We're supposed to be Hero Support—well, you're supposed to be Hero Sup—anyway, it's like the school's split up into two opposite factions—" He smiles at Rachel, and Rachel beams back at him. She taught him what that word means. "—when what we're supposed to do is help each other."

"And yet we don't trust each other," Tina adds, the corners of her mouth turned almost unnoticeably upwards.

"Exactly," Finn agrees.

"We should crash their party," Artie suggests gleefully. "My robot has a button for that."

"Exact—no. No, no crashing the party," says Finn. "If you sign up to help, you get an automatic invite to Santana's party. It's where they deal with the last-minute details." Finn stops. Rachel looks around, and realizes she's not the only one who's frowning at the last bit. "I got Santana as my lab partner. Or she got me, I'm not sure what happened there. I think she might have been saving the seat for somebody else. But anyway, she talks to me."

"Talks to you?" Mercedes scowls. "You mean tries to talk you out of hanging out with us. Like I said."

Finn shrugs. "Sort of, I guess."

"So we go to this party, and fall into a trap?" Kurt asks warily.

"No," Finn says. "It's Santana's house, and she has that multiplication thing, but I don't think any of her doubles want to clean up after that kind of mess. And most people are terrified of Santana, so you can take the opportunity to talk to them. See, you have one thing in common already."

"That was kind of a mean thing to say," Kurt points out, deflating.

Finn searches Rachel's eyes, and she purses her lips and says, "It was pretty mean." For a moment, she's scared Finn is about to burst into outraged yelling, but he just blinks once, thinks it through, and apologizes.

"But I do like the way you think," Kurt says, eyes gleaming in delight.

*
Each one of them ends up in a different subsection of the committee—Brittany divides them up by powers and other special talents, and only the manager of each division attends the general meetings, which is ridiculous, because each division consists of four people at most, and Rachel's manager in lighting is a tool. She's actually glad she's not getting any credit for this—she'd rather not be held responsible for the headlight-themed extravaganza Mike Chang has in mind.

She was more excited about having an excuse to talk to Finn about the dance—and maybe to oversee the proceedings and make sure the dance wasn't a completely tacky affair, if she has to be honest—than she was about Santana's party, but now that her two single goals have been thwarted, she figures she might as well attend that too.

Santana lives in the suburbs, in a modestly big house not significantly different from the modestly big houses surrounding it. The first thing that catches Rachel's attention when she walks in is that the music playing is bubblegum pop—and that it stays bubblegum pop song after song, like someone hired Miley Cyrus's agent to DJ.

It's clean and unobtrusive, though, which allows for talking without tearing your throat apart, and Rachel assumes Santana left song selection in Brittany's hands. Brittany actually cares about making the dance good for everyone.

Tina and Finn are out by the pool—Rachel refused to go near it out of residual fear someone would try to throw her in it, but used her hair as an excuse. It looks unusually good today, not that it matters. It just so happens that when you're friends with someone forever, they've already seen your hair in every state of distress, so Rachel will just end up ruining it when she gets in bed later, before she's gotten any use out of it.

She still twirls a lock around her finger as she makes her way across the kitchen, because she's allowed to feel pretty, at least. She's earned that much.

Rachel sees Mercedes grab a can of Coke and walk up to Mike Chang, say, "So, on a scale of one to a lot, how much do you wish someone other than Santana had thrown this party?"

Mike looks at his fidgeting feet for a second before getting sidetracked by Mercedes's cleavage. "Nine, I guess? She has the biggest pool out of anyone in Sky High."

Rachel's not sure how she feels about that. You can't fake that, right? Maybe if he becomes interested in Mercedes's cleavage, he'll become interested in the rest of Mercedes eventually. And, if he doesn't, Mercedes will burn him down. There's a soothing thought.

Mercedes thinks it over and nods. "I see your point, don't think I don't," she says, and he smiles in relief, letting down his guard.

Okay, so they're fine. Rachel sort of thought this party would be more out of hand, but it seems like Santana has successfully instilled the fear of the hostess into every last guest. It's really just the homecoming committee and most of the sophomore and junior heroes, anyway. There's not a single face Rachel hasn't seen before, regardless of whether she knows their names or not, and, if her observations are right, none of the kids who regularly get in trouble are here.

She's not really in the mood for mingling, either way—Santana has almost convinced Finn to take her to the dance, and any attempt at conversation Rachel makes downstairs is going to be misconstrued as a desperate measure to get a date for tomorrow, which is not a first impression Rachel Berry is willing to make on anyone. Besides, she's fine with not going. She's fine with not mingling. She's used to the popular kids looking down on her, and it's not like she really expected that to change just because she was going to superhero school. The only thing she realistically hoped for was not being the odd one out for once.

The first floor seems quiet, so she climbs the stairs unhurriedly, trying not to make it look like she's fleeing the party. There's a light on a door to the left across the hallway, and Rachel doesn't mean to pry, so she just leans back against the wall and takes a sip of her soda.

"—but who the hell invited them?" Quinn is saying. Rachel can only see a blur of dark hair, probably belonging to Santana, through the narrow gap between the door and the frame, but she'd recognize that timbre anywhere.

Someone coughs and says, "I did."

"I thought I had veto privilege on who got invited to this thing," Santana mutters.

The previous voice becomes clearer to Rachel when it says, "They joined the committee. I can't change a fifty-year-old rule just because this year I'm friends with the hostess." Brittany. If she wasn't such an exploitable doormat, Rachel would take note of the way she manages people to apply it to her own campaign in a couple of years. Assuming she doesn't get kicked out of school for not having any actual powers before she has the chance to run for student council, that is.

"Fine," Santana says, and storms out of the room. She doesn't notice Rachel standing there—or if she does, she doesn't say a word about it—but Rachel waits until Santana's out of sight to walk down the stairs and out the door.

There's nothing for her here.

*
There are aspects of life where Rachel is optimistic to a fault, and that fault almost always manifests itself as a cruel, desperate form of disappointment. By midday the next day, a substantial part of her brain—well, her heart, really—is still positive Finn will realize Santana only wants to convert him to their self-worshipping sect and he will ask Rachel to the dance before the dance is over.

Except midday is when Finn comes by every day to take care of the apple tree in Rachel's backyard, and he looks happy and not at all confused when he announces that Santana's worn him down with her whining and he's slicking up his hair and joining her cult at six.

Those may not be his exact words.

"You what?" she thinks she says, but he frowns and she figures she can fix it. "I mean, that's—well, it's not great, because it's Santana and she hates me, but I guess I can be happy for you."

There's something to be said for a boy who readily grins at such a bad lie.

"What is it, though?" Rachel asks. Finn frowns. "Santana. What is it about her? Is it the possibility of fulfilling that cliché sexual fantasy where you do it with several women at once?"

"What?"

"Of course not. You're too young for a set-up like that to be successful for all the parties involved." Rachel's eyes widen. Foot in mouth, take three hundred million. Changing the subject. "Speaking of parties, did anything interesting happen last night while I was gone?" She smiles, and softens her tone into a good-natured mocking one to add, "Besides you being seduced into the evil side by Santana."

"I'm not the person you call for gossip, Berry," Finn says, plucking—growing until it drops, technically—an apple from the tree. Rachel gives him a look, one that says don't try to pull that on me, Finn, you're the one who knows exactly how many kids Angelina has, and Finn rolls his eyes and laughs. "Not for the in-depth kind. Mike asked Mercedes to the dance."

"Mike? Chang? Didn't he have a date already?"

"Yep," Finn says, biting into the apple. It's not as knee-wobbling-worthy as Rachel expected it to be. "He offered to ditch his previous date and take her. But apparently Mercedes and his previous date bonded in the detention room over whether it was really fair to be punished for accidentally electrifying or burning your classmates, and Mercedes felt it was wrong to say yes. So she's going stag with Tina and Kurt. And I think Artie. You should join them."

Rachel looks down for a second, considering, and sighs.

Affectionately, Finn adds, "Are you sure you don't want to go to the dance?"

Rachel nods halfheartedly. "I'm sure."

"Okay," Finn says, putting an end to that conversation.

It's not terrible, missing a school dance. It's not even the prom, it's just homecoming, and, judging by the plans she had access to after signing up for the committee, there's nothing special about it. As a matter of fact, the decorations barely pass for fashionable, the theme doesn't make sense for a dance—Rachel tried to get them to save it for maybe a musical competition, but Brittany thought it would be lovely to open her tenure with leather and Grease—and besides, it turns out one of her dads, Steve, is going to be there, which would be horribly awkward, especially since he can't show her daughter's powers off in front of the other alumni, which was the reason he took Figgins's offer to speak at the thing in the first place.

This was in July, before he knew Rachel was a dirty lying squib, but it's better not to dwell on that.

She's sitting in the living room, watching TV with her homework for What Heroes Don't Talk About: A History of Hero Support class in her lap to tend to during commercials, when her other dad, who went to school two years earlier than this year's reunion class, comes down the stairs, stills in the doorway and says, "If you have a minute, I'd like a word with you."

Rachel doesn't actually have a minute, but you don't say no when Rapids wants to have a word with you. Rachel's not sure why her least imposing dad is the one who has superstrength—she still expects John to be the one who takes her bed down to the garden when she wants to sleep outside in the summer without getting grass marks all over her skin.

Then again, that's why they make a good team: John can fly, and he muscled up in preparation for carrying heavy people out of burning buildings. Rachel doubts Steve would be able to hold so much as a ten-year-old child if he hadn't inherited a super power that made it easy.

"It's not my fault my powers haven't showed up yet," Rachel says preemptively, following her dad around the stairs and into their small library. "If anything, maybe it was all those distractions I had as a child."

Her dad laughs. "I'm sorry, are you saying your powers got distracted by your tap-dancing?"

Rachel huffs in outrage. "I'm saying that maybe I developed too quickly in other areas, and that halted the power process."

"What kind of development are we talking about?"

"Mental development." Also her boobs, but that's not the point. "My smarts intimidate my powers."

"That's not how it works," her dad mutters.

She goes on. "Hinder a child's superhuman development because her human growth process has so far been flawless, smooth sailing? That seems wrong of nature, don't you think? I'd be willing to file a complaint if that were possible." Rachel waits. It might be. You never know with nature. "Is it?"

"No," her dad says firmly. "But you're going to Sky High now, despite your current unfortunate lack of special abilities, and Steve and I thought it would be a good idea to let you in somewhere." As if on cue, the portrait of Rachel's former dog Waffles drops two feet down the wall, revealing a digital screen with nothing but an incomprehensible series of numbers and a blue blob in the shape of a hand on display.

Rachel beams. "The sanctum?" she asks, eyes gleaming with childish delight.

Her dad nods and smiles playfully. "Unless you consider this sort of concession a hindrance to your growth."

"No. Of course not," Rachel says quickly. "It can only help. Besides, I'm paying for the allowance by missing my first Sky High homecoming dance."

Her dad sighs. "You can still go, you know."

Rachel shakes her head. "I don't want to go." Her dad tilts his head in confusion—surely not because he thinks Rachel wants to go—Rachel would have wanted to go with Finn, yes, but she could take or leave the actual dance—but because it's not the sacrifice Rachel just put it down as, and her dad takes coherence seriously.

But, sacrifices or not, she's being let into the sanctum. She's looked forward to this since she was barely three. No way she's going to give that up just because it would technically contradict her deepest wishes if one of her numerous mutually exclusive theories turned out to be accurate. There are too many variables and too little proof.

The sanctum, though, the sanctum is right there. Or it will be right there once Rachel places her palm on that digital screen.

"Go ahead," her dad says. "I already put in your hand print."

It's—thrilling, exhilarating, electrifying don't even begin to cover how Rachel feels when she takes a few slow steps and raises her hand, taking in the moment. The first time she's being allowed into the sanctum. It would be better if she had her powers, but it's good like this too—maybe more meaningful, how she's being let in despite that. How maybe it's not her powers that matter, but who she is inside, the person she's becoming.

The screen lights up around her hand with a tinny noise of success, and the historical reference bookcase next to it moves to reveal a brick inner wall and two iron poles. Rachel turns to her dad, grinning, and goes back to the task at hand. She grabs onto the pole, waits for her dad to do the same, and slides down easily. It's the length of a story—two if you take a lift from the master bedroom—and Rachel doesn't have time to adjust before she's in.

She holds back a squeal and takes in the minimalist set-up, the metal-colored walls. The place is pretty much a large hi-tech basement. It's freakishly clean—not that the rest of the house isn't, but the emptiness and material of the surfaces, not to mention the shiny computer system facing the poles, makes the spotlessness conspicuous.

Only one of the screens is on—it shows a map of the city with green circles marking what Rachel assumes are areas commonly targeted by supervillains.

"That's mine," her dad says. "I'll teach you how to use it when you're calm enough to absorb new information."

"You can totally teach me now," Rachel says, swirling around. "I'm totally calm."

Her dads nods, amused. "Totally," he says sarcastically. "But you want to see the rest of the sanctum, right?"

Rachel nods enthusiastically. Her dad shows her around the recreational area, which consists of a pool table, several game machines, a virtual plane-piloting videogame set-up with a chair and a plasma screen, and hey, is that DDR? Why did nobody tell Rachel they had that?

"Why is that here?" she asks, and proceeds to make her dad promise they'll move that particular machine to Rachel's exercise room.

The other side of the sanctum is lined up with devices and giant robot pieces, showcased on top of tall wooden bases with plaques announcing their previous owner. If that documentary on Rapids and Rock Ant ever happens, this collection will be a good starting point for an uplifting yet emotional retrospective. Glass eyes, inoperative sound bugs, Airduct's electrical blue cape... Rachel's biological mom's costume, the one she wore before she was put in the asylum, kept in a glass case hanging off the wall.

Rachel doesn't know much about her mom. She was never her project—she wasn't even her baby, from what Rachel has been told. She never thought of herself as a mother, only as Whirl Girl. Rachel is her dads' daughter, and she knew from the get-go that a schizophrenic mom wasn't one she could realistically get to know in person, so she never bothered to inquire into any aspect of her mom's past other than her medical records. She only recognizes the outfit from newspaper clippings and the big W hand-sewn in twirly calligraphy on the front.

"And this," her dad says proudly, calling Rachel's attention to the gadget placed upon the tallest, shiniest base, "is the Lifter."

"I knew you hadn't thrown it away," Rachel says. It's so gratifying to have proof of something you've suspected your whole life, in spite of—especially with—everyone telling you whatever you saw your dads bring home wasn't what you thought it was. It looked like a ray gun, and Rachel had seen her dads—well, Rock Ant and Rapids, anyway—showcase it on TV after their last fight with Countess Crusade, so Rachel knew perfectly well what she'd caught a glimpse of when they had come back late into the night that day.

But they kept denying it. Like Rachel could even have gotten into the sanctum if she'd wanted to.

"We didn't want you to get any ideas," her dad says.

Rachel's jaw drops. "It still works?"

"I wouldn't know," her dad replies. "I think all the necessary pieces are still there, but I wouldn't have an use for it." Rachel is kind of in awe. "Rachel," her dad calls firmly, pulling Rachel out of her trance. She turns to face him. "It's not a toy."

"I know."

"It got deactivated for a reason. There is no scenario, real or hypothetical, in which stealing someone else's power wouldn't be an inexcusable, appalling course of action."

"I know," Rachel says, nodding. "I'm not planning to use it. It's just good to know I was right all along."

"All right then," her dad says, "that's the sanctum. Make yourself at home—dinner's not going to magically cook itself," and then he walks back to the poles, which lift him out of the room.

Rachel takes it in and makes a beeline for the pool table. She's terrible at it—her dad taught him the basics once, but they supposedly didn't have a pool table, so she never got to practice. She's beginning to think her dads were serious about derailing her competitive streak.

Well, that is so not going to happen if Rachel has any say in the matter, so she finds the balls and starts arranging them.

*
On Monday, Finn oversleeps and doesn't have time to come by Rachel's house for breakfast before the bus picks them up, which really throws Rachel. Her stomach has become accustomed to Ken's experiments in bus-flying, so she's pretty sure that's not the reason why she feels like she's about to be sick.

Finn doesn't seem to take notice, which both relieves and annoys her. It is a fact of life that Finn doesn't notice anything that doesn't carry a look-at-me sign and a pocket dictionary—after years of friendship, Rachel has come to expect very little in the way of perceptiveness. She shouldn't be bothered by it—which means there has to be something wrong with her.

It's not jealousy, because Tina kept an eye on Finn for her at the homecoming dance and called yesterday to tell her he and Santana barely even danced together; apparently Santana was too busy playing hostess to everyone else. So that's not it.

But if that's not it, and considering she has no symptoms of possibly being sick, then Rachel isn't feeling well for no reason despite her energy morning routine, and the last time that happened was the day the only boyfriend Finn's mom has ever managed to keep around for longer than two months since Rachel met her left Finn's mom for a blonde skank none of them had ever seen before.

That was a really bad day. Rachel really doesn't want a repeat.

"I have a bad feeling about today," she tells Finn when they get off the bus.

Finn turns his head and gives her a worried look. "What kind of bad feeling?"

"The bad kind, Finn," Rachel says pointedly, because Finn should know Rachel doesn't go around feigning ambiguous presentiments, but before Rachel gets the chance to explain further, Santana—two of her—hop up to Finn and flank his sides, twining their arms with his. Finn looks back at Rachel, and Rachel lets him go. It's not really his fault he got himself a girlfriend before Rachel worked up the courage to tell him how she feels.

While Emma is busy setting up the projector, Rachel tells the first-year Hero Support class about the terrible disaster that is surely upon them, but she has no history of premonitory abilities anywhere in her family tree, so no one takes her seriously.

No one but Tina, anyway, who walks up to her on the way to their Trigonometry As Applied to Crime-Fighting lesson and lets Rachel talk her ear off about her fight or flight instincts.

"But it c-c-could be just a hunch, right?" Tina asks when Rachel's done, and, to Rachel's surprise, her tone isn't so much patronizing as hopeful. Rachel has suspected it for a while, but this is the first time she feels like Tina is the only person left who truly believes Rachel belongs in superhero school by nature—that, regardless of Rachel's powers or lack thereof, she's more of a hero than anyone else in the school will ever be.

Rachel shrugs. "I doubt it, but yes, the possibility exists."

"And y-y-you're sure you're not mistaking something else for intuition?"

Rachel nods, and Tina looks away nervously and drops the subject.

*
Rachel has almost stopped feeling that push and pull in her gut when she sees Finn get kidnapped into the hero table by Santana. She looks at Quinn, who doesn't seem happy about that development either, but scowls when she notices she's in Rachel's line of vision.

Santana hauls Finn out of the cafeteria when they're done eating, and Rachel is about to breathe and let herself believe that she's escaped the worst when Quinn walks up to the sidekicks' table and dares them to meet her eyes.

Kurt and Rachel are the only ones who don't look down at their tray, but Quinn ignores Kurt in favor of torturing Rachel. It's just Rachel's luck.

"Didn't see you at the dance," Quinn says. It could be a simple statement void of connotations, but her tone makes it sound like she's halfway between inordinately pleased and ready to punish Rachel for it. For something that pleases her inordinately. Some people should just go ahead and get a therapist before their mental disorders pop up.

"I was indisposed," Rachel says civilly, picking up her fork and hoping Quinn will take it as a hint to leave her alone. In Rachel's line of vision, Artie looks like he's a second away from excusing himself to the nurse's office, and Tina is squirming the way she does when she's having trouble morphing into her ferret form.

"Were you," Quinn says, in that tone that is sickeningly sweet and dripping with sarcasm at the same time.

"Yes," Rachel says, looking up at Quinn, "and I don't know why you care so much."

Quinn's jaw drops in fake outrage, and then she drops the act, and presses her lips together in a cruel sort of anticipation. "I'm so sick of you," she hisses, nostrils flaring slightly, and when she raises her hand, Rachel has no idea what Quinn is trying to do, but it doesn't seem really threatening. If she freezes Rachel, someone will eventually defrost her. There are a lot of people in the school, and most of them are too scared of Santana and Coach Sylvester to focus their fear on what Quinn Fabray might do to them if they help one of her victims out.

Rachel definitely doesn't expect a razor-sharp icicle to fall from the ceiling like a stalactite and drill through the middle of the table. That's why she jumps back, the shock of it, that's all. She's not going to let Quinn win, so she stays put while everyone else at the table runs for their life.

Rachel thought popular girls like Quinn were supposed to control that sort of rage in public.

"What is wrong with you?" Rachel says, voice accidentally squeaky, and stands up. Half the cafeteria has fled to the corners of the room, too scared to take part in a fight and too curious to leave and miss the show. Rachel hopes someone has the decency to call a teacher. "What have I done to you?"

"What have you done to me?" Quinn echoes, sarcastic. "How about prance around like you deserve to be here even though you don't have any powers and probably never will? How about breaking your arm and letting everyone believe it was me?"

"You're not doing yourself any favors by threatening to hurt me now," Rachel points out, lower than she intended.

Low enough for Quinn to ignore it. "How about—oh, I don't know—leaving me without a mother?" she adds instead.

"That wasn't me," Rachel says quickly. "And she brought it upon herself. It's not my fault she chose to lead a life of villainy rather than use her powers for the good of the—"

"Shut up," Quinn says, and freezes Rachel's tongue.

Rachel's flight response makes her scurry off to the other end of the broken table. So much for standing up for herself. While she's here, though, she tries to figure out what she has to do to get to an exit, making sure not to break eye contact with Quinn. That would be cowardice, and she doesn't want to imply she's going to flee the scene before she does—doesn't want to give Quinn extra time and reason to taunt her.

The only open door is at the other end of the cafeteria, though, and the way is impeded by a maze of tables and chairs.

It is at moments like these, Rachel notes, that you realize just how big a room is, and how much embarrassing running you're going to have to do before you inevitably reach a point where you can't move any further.

She notes that, first, and then she bolts.

It only takes her about five steps to realize the most direct way to get the door alive is crawling under the tables, so if Quinn throws her blocks of ice they'll break the furniture before they break Rachel.

She's vaguely aware of that happening, of Quinn yelling at her from several feet above and freezing things in between breaking stuff with propulsive icicles. Every few feet Quinn overfreezes a chair and the cold extends along the floor and burns Rachel's palms where they hold her up.

Quinn can't actually be trying to kill Rachel at school. Besides, didn't she just say something about not wanting to be held responsible for harming someone? Rachel's heard rumors in the halls—rumors about how Quinn was all set to climb to the very top of the social hierarchy in this school before everyone found out who her mother was, rumors about how some of the kids she'd tortured before the news spread did all they could to get back at her, to ostracize her. Rumors about how every time Quinn does something wrong the board meets to vote on whether they should make a preemptive strike and send her to solitary before she has time to release her inner villain.

Rachel also heard Quinn had intended to run for student body president and ended up managing Brittany's campaign instead, and Santana is only as popular as she is because Quinn needed someone to bear the spotlight when she got tired of people whispering about her and how easy it would be for someone like her to tear the school apart without anyone noticing until it was too late.

Quinn's put up with that for over a year now, and Rachel has done nothing that would guarantee a degree of anger intense enough for someone like Quinn to throw away all that effort.

Quinn is still throwing icicles around, though. The next time Rachel gets out from under a table before crawling into another, she notices Quinn has frozen Kurt—what's left of Kurt when he melts, anyway—and Artie, who turned his wheelchair into a huge robot. It's heartwarming to think that maybe they were trying to defend her, but then an icicle grazes her side and all the heat is gone.

Somehow her path gets derailed by out-of-place chairs, and when she stands up again she finds herself backed against a wall and facing Quinn, the door just a few feet to her left. On the bright side, at least she can feel her tongue again.

"Not so eager to talk back now, are you?" Quinn says, raising her voice.

Rachel looks past Quinn, past the wreckage of tables and chairs and plastic trays and food in the cafeteria, and sets her eyes on the maze of clouds above the school premises. She's not sure what compels her to do that—if she's falling prey to the same principle that makes people hide under their sheets or close their eyes like that will make them invisible, or if she's inadvertently trying to distract Quinn, or if she's so convinced she can't win that she'd rather take the hit and not see it coming—but the next thing she knows the clouds are getting darker and darker, spreading around and hiding the blue sky, and the storm begins like something out of an adventure movie, thunder roaring just seconds before it starts pouring rain over the sea.

Deliberately or not, the whole maneuver does distract Quinn, who looks back just in time to see a flash of lightning set fire to what was left of the cafeteria.

That's the moment Principal Figgins and Coach Sylvester pick to walk in.

*
After a fair amount of yelling and a moment of complete terror when Principal Figgins orders Rachel to stop the rain and it takes her over a minute—enough time for Rachel to convince herself the storm wasn't actually her doing, that she's still powerless—to curb her nerves and do it, Coach Sylvester convinces the principal to sandstorm Rachel and Quinn right into the detention room, a blindingly white room where a) they can't use their powers and b) a teacher is waiting for them.

"Mr. Schuester," is the name Quinn uses to address him, slipping into a chair and avoiding his gaze.

"Quinn," Mr. Schuester sighs, sounding disappointed. Rachel is of the firm opinion that teachers should never become attached to their students in a way that creates a bias out of concern for them. "I'm really disappointed in you," Mr. Schuester adds. Well, that confirms it. He's—what class does he teach? Rachel needs to remember so she can avoid it if it's an elective. Something about languages—Saving the World: Communication In Other Countries?—for heroes only. Which Rachel is now.

Oh God, Rachel finally got her power. One of them, at least. And she's stuck in detention with Quinn instead of using it, this is so wrong.

"In my defense, I didn't plan for it to happen, Mr. Schuester, it just did," Quinn says. That's not going to make this go faster.

Mr. Schuester sighs again. "Quinn, we've talked about this. As a matter of fact, the last time we talked about this was just two weeks ago, and I thought we decided you would quit torturing people, not take the bullying up another notch." Mr. Schuester shakes his head. "You never pulled anything like this last year."

"I wasn't quite as strong last year as I am now," Quinn mutters.

"Quinn," Mr. Schuester says. "It's not a disgrace to let someone else win." Rachel didn't even want to fight, what is this about? "Trust me, no one expects you to be better than everyone."

"That's right," Quinn says, smirking in a way that makes Rachel's chest tighten. She looks so sad. Masking it, but sad. "They expect me to be worse. I'm tired of living up against their expectations. It would be so much easier to just give in and become the person they already think I am—"

"No," Mr. Schuester says, "don't do that, Quinn. You get straight As, you're great at Physics, you handle your power better than most seniors—better than some pro heroes." Mr. Schuester waits for Quinn to absorb his words. "You can push past this. You are not that person. You don't ever have to be that person."

"How can you even know that?"

"I just do," Mr. Schuester, "and you have a week of detention to think about that."

Quinn makes a disgruntled noise.

"And you—Rachel Berry, huh?" Mr. Schuester says, looking at her. Rachel nods shakily. "I don't know you, and I don't know if you would have engaged in the fight from the beginning had you already been able to use your power." Rachel opens her mouth to say that she wouldn't have done that, but Mr. Schuester lifts a finger to stop her. "Miss Pillsbury thinks you deserve a second chance, and she managed to convince Principal Figgins to let you off with a warning and an hour of detention after class today."

Rachel beams in relief, even though this isn't even her fault in the first place. "Thank you, Mr. Schuester," she says politely. "I promise I won't disappoint you."

Quinn sniggers, but Mr. Schuester doesn't say anything—he just leaves and says he'll come back in a few minutes.

Rachel breathes in deep, and decides to take the high road. "What do you say?" Rachel offers, and Quinn turns her head only enough to be able to see Rachel from the corner of her eye. "Truce?"

Quinn frowns like she can't believe Rachel would have the nerve to say something like that, and spits out, "In your dreams." Then she looks away from Rachel and adds, loud enough to make sure Rachel hears, "Freakshow," and Rachel resigns herself to remaining in silence until Mr. Schuester lets them out.

*
The halls are virtually deserted when Rachel walks out of the detention room after class, but she finds Finn waiting for her, leaning against her locker.

"I heard about the fight," he says sheepishly.

Rachel shakes her head in disbelief. "I'm sure you did."

"I did," Finn says, frowning. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there. And I'm sorry I didn't listen to you this morning. I should have stuck with you. I know you don't fake hunches. And I know you had a legit one once."

"That's the only one I've ever had," Rachel says, feeling herself give in. "Had ever had. Before today."

"I also heard about the other thing," Finn adds, visibly relaxing. He even smiles a little. "We should celebrate."

They should. Rachel should, at least. She'd almost given up hope. "Your girlfriend might want you to spend time with her," she says, shutting her locker.

"Santana's not—I mean, I'm not sure if she is or not, but—that's not the point," Finn babbles. "You're my best friend, okay? I can make time for you. We can go to that weird coffee place you like with the unpronounceable, unpredictable drinks. I'll let you pick mine."

Rachel smothers an urge to mention that it's perfectly possible to know what those drinks contain if you know the meaning of their names, but she knows Finn really must be sorry if he's willing to drink coffee for her, so she lets it go. For now.

"Fine," she says. "You can meet me there at six."

Finn laughs. She knows why—he told her about it once, how she always makes a show of feeling affronted or cross before she forgives him. It's happened so many times that Finn has actually taken notice and now finds it amusing.

"Sure," he says, and Rachel takes advantage of Finn's temporary receptiveness to teach him all she knows about lattes.

*
Finn is thirty-five minutes late when Rachel looks around the place and notices a familiar head of hair, and said head turns and notices Rachel.

There is a number of reasons why Rachel would never have expected to run into Quinn Fabray here. It's a coffeehouse run by a nice Austrian family who seemed to do well on their own. The place is located in the corner of a backstreet a considerable distance away from one of the two bus stops that connect Rachel's neighborhood with the city. The music isn't loud or commercial, the lighting is more cozy than bright, and Rachel has never seen anyone she knows here, except for the few times she dragged Finn along. And she really thinks she would have known if they were hiring, but it must have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, because Rachel wouldn't have missed a 'help wanted' sign on the door, and Quinn is carrying a coffee pot and refilling customers' cups.

Quinn waits until the coffee pot is empty to leave it on the bar and approach Rachel. Forty-five minutes late. Finn has never been exactly punctual, but forty-five minutes are too many minutes for Rachel to believe Finn is just late.

"Got stood up?" Quinn asks, with less bite than Rachel expected to hear. Rachel is about to deny Quinn's accusation when Quinn adds, "Don't lie to me, you've been checking your watch every two minutes since you got here."

"It's not a big deal," Rachel lies.

"Right," Quinn says. "You're waiting for Finn, right?"

Rachel glares at her, and Quinn sighs. It sounds like she's giving up on being annoyed at Rachel. Probably a good thing, all in all. If Quinn stops hating her, she might be able to get through the year without misusing her power and being put in detention for defending herself again.

Defending herself with her power.

God, that feels so good to think.

"All right, fine, I'll take that truce," Quinn says, confirming Rachel's suspicions and sliding into the booth across the table from Rachel. "But let me ask you something."

Rachel smiles contrivedly. "Okay," she says, still wary.

"Does he know you're in love with him?" Quinn asks, and Rachel's head abruptly stops swirling. Her eyes widen, and Quinn notices. "Oh, come on, it's not like you've been subtle about it."

"That's not any of your business," Rachel says, as cordially as she can manage.

"It's my business if you occupy a table by yourself for over an hour because you can't accept he might just not be interested." Rachel is deliberately avoiding eye contact, and there is no way Quinn doesn't understand that hint. Which means Quinn is deliberately disregarding Rachel's wishes. That's just great. "Santana went over to his house earlier today, he probably got held up. Santana can be really persuasive."

Rachel looks up and scowls. "Don't you have things to do?"

"Not really," Quinn says, pursing her lips.

"I don't want to talk about this with you."

"Are you sure about that? Because it's generally good to let these things out, and I do respect a tr—"

"No, he doesn't know," Rachel says, interrupting. The sooner they get this over with, the sooner Rachel can leave without being rude. "And he's dating Santana now, so he's never going to know."

Quinn raises her hands in surrender. "Okay, I get it. I'm not going to tell him, God. That would only help you."

"That's really generous, Quinn, thank you," Rachel says sarcastically.

"You're welcome," Quinn says. "Besides, I can barely comprehend the idea of being in love with someone and not letting them know somehow."

Rachel chuckles, stirring what's left of her whipped cream into what's left of her vanilla latte. "Well, not everyone is you."

"Yeah, and you know what?" Quinn says pointedly. "Some people have never been interested in any of their friends, so they wouldn't know." She shakes her head. "I do have things to do," she says, and sits up, slithering out of the booth.

She's still holding onto the edge of the table when Finn barges in.

"Okay, before you say anything," he says breathlessly, "I know I'm like, an hour late and you're not going to like my excuse, so can we skip over that part and order something to eat? I'm starving."

Rachel takes a few seconds to pretend she's pondering a decision, and she's about to tell Finn to sit when the door opens again and Santana walks in.

Quinn looks even more taken aback to see her here than Rachel feels. "Oh, God," she mutters, hiding her face for a second before she grins and turns to face Santana. "Hi."

"Quinn?" Santana asks with a frown, looking Quinn up and down. "I didn't know you had a job."

"Yeah, well," Quinn says, "it's a new development." Perking up, she adds, "I found this great dress on the Internet, for the winter formal? I have to wear it. It goes so well with the theme." They already have a theme? "It's not 'practical', though, so I have to pay for it myself," she adds, and shrugs for good measure. Rachel can't tell if it's the truth or not, but it sounds believable enough, and Santana seems to buy it. She even orders a drink in a totally normal, supportive tone, and, when Quinn heads back to the bar, she sits next to Rachel.

Leaning over the table and turning her head to face Rachel, she smiles gently and says, "I heard about your power. You're transferring to the hero class now, right? We'll have a bunch of classes together. Congratulations."

The worst part is, Rachel had her pegged as the kind of person who says something like that and means Rachel is lucky she'll get to spend time with her, but that's not how it sounds like at all. It sounds like she's genuinely extending her friendship. Rachel knew sidekicks were looked down on by everyone else at school, but she didn't expect to see such a significant change in the way people treated her this soon.

"I guess we will," Rachel says, taking the offer. If you can't beat them, join them, right? It's not like she can get rid of her without sounding like a crazy jealous bitch, and she could use having one less enemy.

"Great," Santana says, "I can't wait. Finn just showed me the tree in your backyard, it's the most amazing thing." Finn throws Rachel an apologetic look. Rachel's dads gave him a key so he would stop breaking in through Rachel's bedroom window at ungodly hours of the morning on Sundays, not so he could show his new girlfriend the only plant he's ever tried to keep permanently alive. "He told me about it in Science class—we're lab partners, you know that, right?—and I just really wanted to see it. I hope you don't mind."

Rachel does mind. "Not at all," she lies. She's pretty sure it's obvious, but Santana lets her get away with it, and Rachel relaxes a little. Whatever her reasons, maybe Santana really does want to be friends with her, and that's not nearly as scary as being picked on for the rest of the year.

*
Surprisingly, neither Santana nor Quinn accidentally-on-purpose spill their drinks on her, or slip any poison into her latte, so she gets home safe and sound, holding onto Finn's arm, because Santana does it and because it's not too girlfriend-y and because it's been an exhausting day.

Finn promises to drop by for breakfast the next morning—claims he was too wired to sleep last night, but that won't be a problem this time—and leaves Rachel to walk into her dads having a conversation with the principal on speakerphone.

Or, her dad Steve is talking over Principal Figgins's attempts to answer his concerns, and John is sitting idly by, pretending to read a book but obviously paying more attention to what's going on beside him. It's how they do pretty much everything—Steve sets down the poorly thought-out groundwork, and John catalogues the parts he's going to have to fix when it's done.

"—kidding me?" is the first thing she overhears. "She can control the weather. I think that grants her direct access to the hero class."

"It does," Principal Figgins says tiredly, like they've been going over it for a while. "It does, but don't you think it would be more... suitable for everyone involved if she joined each of her new classes when they don't have any lessons under way? Besides, that will give her time to get tested on the subjects she has already studied and done wor—"

"You're going to make her take sidekick tests? She can control the weather, for fuck's sake. And she's smart. She can catch up with a month's worth of hero lessons faster than I can question how the fuck you're running that school."

Rachel has a feeling of déjà vu—déjà entendu? She's heard this before, when she got the chicken pox in the third grade and missed two weeks of school. Her dads mean well—Steve is big on academic achievement, which might have been too much pressure on Rachel if it wasn't for how much effort John always put into teaching her the value of knowledge, and making sure she learned things regardless of how well or badly she tested on them—though that's never really been an issue for her. Either way, it's no wonder she's so academically oriented.

She plops herself down in an armchair, looking at John wearily. "In the interest of complete honesty," she tells him, blocking out the phone conversation. "I'm not yet sure I can control the weather. My power could easily only apply to the creation and dismantlement of thunderstorms."

"Do you really believe that?" her dad says, in that comforting way he has of saying things.

"No," she says with a winning grin. "I'm pretty sure I can control the weather. But I figured I'd get that out of the way, so it doesn't have the chance to turn into another big, fat lie like the one about my formerly non-existent powers."

Her dad gives her a smile. It's the same smile he always offers when she mentions her year-long affair with dishonesty, and every single time it makes her feel like he knows something he's not telling her. Like maybe he knew all along and was waiting for her to do the right thing. She never asks, though, because that kind of thing would guarantee at least five days of silent treatment, and transferring to hero classes means the next couple of weeks will bring in a lot of new homework that she will inevitably want to discuss with him.

Eventually the fight with the principal loses steam, and her dad Steve excuses himself to get a drink, and that's when John pops in and puts and end to the conversation the way Rachel knew he would: telling the principal Rachel will wrap up what she's got going on in her sidekick classes and transfer as she sees fit—not because she needs it, academically speaking, but because she's kind of obsessive about not leaving things unfinished, and she's pretty sure she got that from him.

"So what does this mean for you?" her dad asks her afterwards.

"I'll be in all hero classes by Friday," she says. "And I get to start taking Science with Finn tomorrow. We finished the workshop on polishing your hero's boots for maximum stability just this morning." Her dad raises an amused eyebrow. "Don't laugh—it will come in handy when I'm stranded sidekickless saving civilians in whichever Middle-Eastern country we aimlessly declare war on next."

"Well, when you put it that way," he concedes, still smiling.

Rachel grins.

*
She catches up with Finn on the way to her new Science class, after promising Kurt and Artie she doesn't need them to survive a class with Quinn Fabray—in a school this small, the order of unsystematic classes like (Mad) Science is interchangeable, and means sophomores and freshmen share one class and juniors and seniors share another—and getting an unexpectedly affectionate hug from Miss Firefly, whose eyes water with pride when she announces Rachel Berry won't be taking Hero Support with them anymore, but this is not necessarily a goodbye.

Rachel only forgives Miss Firefly's outbursts of emotion because they met each other so long ago. It's incomprehensible to her why that should matter, but somehow it does.

Santana hangs from Finn's arm all the way to the lab, blabbering on about frog entrails and the things you can do with them in a fight, which she learned from having a supervillain prosecutor as a father. Apparently that's the workshop they're starting today, and Rachel is glad she didn't have a heavy breakfast. She's not squeamish, but she has her limits.

It becomes apparent to Rachel when they get to the lab why Santana didn't let go of Finn at all throughout their walk—as soon as they're inside, she drags him to what Rachel assumes is their regular table, and Rachel finds herself standing in front of the entire class, alone and holding her own books, until Mr. Ryerson comes in.

This is what her first day should have been like: everyone looking at her, marveling at sharing their school years with a third-generation hero, someone with three hero parents, a person who will undoubtedly become a legend one day.

The thing is, all the people in this class already know who she is, and couldn't care less that she's here, ready to be the best. Mercedes is in one of the back rows, standing next to Mike Chang, and she sends her a few supportive glances when she's not busy trying to make sense of Mike's flash cards, but that's about as much acknowledgment as she gets until Quinn comes in and her face contracts into a scowl, never leaving Rachel's face as she takes her seat beside Brittany.

"Actually, Miss Fabray," Mr. Ryerson says, and Quinn looks up. "If your partner wouldn't mind, I'm sure Miss Berry here would love to sit with you." Rachel blinks so fast she misses Quinn's reaction to the news, but it can't be worse than the scowl she was welcomed with. "I believe the staff," Mr. Ryerson says as way of explanation, "would quite like you two ladies to get along."

Rachel stifles a snort as she sits on the stool next to Quinn. She mutters, "I thought I wasn't getting punished for the one-sided fight you started." Because, really, it's outrageous. Her dad might have had a point about the way Principal Figgins is running this school. Putting Rachel next to her first self-declared archenemy in a lab brimming with sharp objects makes no sense whatsoever, unless they want one of them to die as a means to stop the trouble.

"Don't worry," Quinn says, shaking her head, the disgust in her expression masked by a fake smile directed at—Mr. Ryerson, who's already begun the lecture. Rachel fumbles around her backpack for a new notebook while Quinn goes on, soft and threateningly at the same time, "I'm on probation. If I lift so much as a finger at your ugly face, I'll get suspended."

"Oh, so that's where the truce came from," Rachel whispers, uncapping a fountain pen to note down the title of the lesson. "Should have known you wouldn't do anything out of the nonexistent goodness of your heart."

It's probably a sign of Rachel's goodness that she feels bad when she realizes the implications of what she's said—what it means for someone who might have worried all along that evil flowed through her veins and there was no way to stop it—but Quinn barely contains a snicker of disbelief and mutters, "Don't be a smart-ass, Berry. Nobody said I couldn't accidentally stab you with a scalpel before we get the chance to change partners next semester."

Rachel feels a tap on her shoulder—Mr. Ryerson is filling the chalkboard with the formulae he just explained at length—and turns around to find an apologetic look in Finn's face—she shrugs it away; this is not his fault—and a note slipped into her fist by Santana herself. It says: Let her bark and she'll never bite you.

Rachel can't help the smile that overflows her face. Later, when Quinn freezes a part of the heat ray they're supposed to build together, Santana sends one of her duplicates—all of them surprisingly apt at manipulating technology—to put it back together.

It makes Rachel feel better, knowing that not everyone in her new class is out to get her.

*
She's so grateful to Santana for fixing her mood in (Mad) Science class that she doesn't even mind when Santana drags Finn to the popular kids' table again.

Finn gives her another apologetic look, but Rachel just says, "Go be pathetic with your girlfriend," and Finn grins in thanks and almost walks back into Mr. Schuester's food tray before Rachel heads over to have lunch with her friends.

"Not leaving us, huh?" Artie says, offering up his palm for Rachel to—high-five him, she assumes. She does it, but she doesn't like it. She's not a high-five kind of girl.

"Why would I?" Rachel asks. It's a stupid question—there are reasons, but none of them apply to Rachel. She knows better than to let unfounded societal rules guide her existence.

Still, Tina replies, "You're a h-h-hero now. You s-s-set fire to the cafeteria with a flash of lightning."

"That was pretty damned awesome," Artie adds, nodding like he's agreeing with Tina, though Tina hasn't remarked on the qualitative aspects of Rachel's side of the fight. The fight she'd frankly rather everyone forgot about, especially the staff. And Quinn.

"Thank you," she says instead, honestly.

"So," Kurt says, whirling his still clean fork in the air to get the table's attention, "how was Rachel Berry's first hero class? Will it merit a chapter in her future autobiography?"

Rachel shrugs. She doesn't want to talk about Quinn right now. She doesn't want to talk about Quinn ever, if she can help it. A part of her wishes it weren't wrong to use the Lifter to rid people of powers they'd be happier not having. If Quinn's mom hadn't married a superhero, Quinn might never have had to put up with whatever it is she's had to put up with in the past year. And neither would have Rachel.

"It was fine," Rachel says. "I got Quinn Fabray as my lab partner, which might be hard to work around if she keeps making everything I have to do harder than it actually is, but she won't sabotage her own grades, so I'll manage." There. Concise, sincere, warrants no extra questions.

The table stays appropriately silent until Artie says, "You know, I have this ray at home you can use to shoot used gum into people's hair. You can borrow it whenever you want."

Rachel considers it—it would be a victory for all of them, given their smirks at the idea—but she's better than that. "That won't be necessary," she says determinedly. "I'm taking the high road."

"Nothing else? Nothing about how different Sidekick Science is from Hero Science? Nothing about all the pretty people?" Kurt says, and then, "Ouch."

Rachel realizes Mercedes must have kicked him under the table when Mercedes says, "Why did nobody ever ask me that?"

"Finn got here first," Kurt says simply. "And neither one of you would recognize a Vivienne Westwood piece if it bit you in the—" Kurt stops at Mercedes's glower. "Sorry," he says instead, seemingly sincere. "We care."

Mercedes glares at him for a few more seconds before nodding and saying, "Good," and returning to her lunch.

Rachel shakes her head and wonders how long it's going to be before any of them realizes what only took Quinn four weeks of glaring and a fight to perceive.

*
Two days later, Rachel realizes that every last teacher in this school has received the memo that they should make Rachel and Quinn partner up or at least stand close to each other whenever possible—like the board really believes that's the right thing to do. Rachel thought the idea was putting them together in a class or two so they'd have the chance to talk out their issues without giving them enough time to kill each other—Rachel originally suspected the staff had been put up to this by Mr. Schuester, but, honestly, whoever ruled the motion mustn't know Quinn Fabray at all. As it turns out, it's a blessing that sophomores and freshmen don't share all their classes, because it seems they intend to apply the same ridiculous modus operandi it to every possible situation without giving it a test run or even thinking it through first.

Regardless of whose brilliant idea this was, Mr. Schuester is definitely in on it. Saving the World: Talking Foreigners Through Rescue doesn't require that much collaborative work and they sit in individual desks, but the classroom is so small that Rachel ends up sandwiched between Quinn and Mercedes, more than close enough for Quinn to sabotage anything and everything she sees fit. It's almost surprising that Quinn stays peaceful for over twenty minutes, but completely predictable that, when Rachel raises her hand to answer a question again, Quinn freezes her arm in place.

Mr. Schuester turns around in the middle of a, "Yes, Miss Ber—" and stops short when he realizes what's happened. "Quinn," he says sternly instead.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Schue," Quinn says. She folds her hands over her notebook and smiles, softly batting her eyelashes. "It was just a reflex."

"I really hope that's true," Mr. Schuester says, glowering a little but resuming the class, and Quinn's smile grows wider in that perfectly calculated way. Rachel shakes her head, because, yes, she likes to be good—be the best—at everything, but who teaches themselves how to fake a smile? It's a little worrying—when it's not completely infuriating.

After class, Mercedes tags along to the cafeteria. The minute they're out of hearing range from any teachers, she says, "I'll burn her hair."

"It's fine," Rachel says. "It's harmless. She won't actually hurt me. It's just a stupid, harmless game to reassert the authority she feels she should have but has been denied by her mixed parentage." She hopes she sounds convincing enough, even though she's not sure at all Quinn intends to keep her abuse non-damaging.

"It doesn't count as a game if one out of two people ain't playing it," Mercedes remarks.

"She thinks I am," Rachel explains. She thinks she's right about that—there have been moments where Quinn really seemed to think Rachel was out to get her. It's a comprehensible concern, though it wouldn't hold up if Quinn bothered to think about it. "But I'm not. So, in a way, I have the upper hand."

"Really?" Mercedes doesn't look satisfied. "You know, Mr. Ryester said I should practice burning bits of things instead of reducing them to ashes. Singeing Quinn Fabray's hair seems like good practice to me. It won't even cause any permanent damage."

Rachel smiles, vaguely patronizing, and shakes her head. "I appreciate your concern, but that won't be necessary. I can wait this out myself."

Mercedes isn't the only one who offers to back Rachel up in the unlikely event that Rachel decides to declare war on Quinn. During lunch, Kurt casually reminds Rachel that the Save the Citizen tournament begins next week and, unless she does something about it, she's going to have to work alongside Quinn.

"And that's going to be a disaster," he concludes.

Tina blinks nervously and says, "But th-they don't use real citizens anymore, what's the worst that could happen?"

"Loss of prestige," Kurt says solemnly.

"My dad was the first freshman who won a round of Save the Citizen around here," Rachel blurts out, sounding more panicky than expository. "It's always been my dream to be the first first-year girl to follow in his footsteps."

Tina blinks. "I c-c-can sneak into her house late at night and rip all her clothes with m-m-my teeth."

Everyone—even Artie, who recently has no eyes for anything other than the ultra speed function he's trying to build into his wheelchair—turns towards her. Kurt is openly leering, which is weird, because it's a mocking look, but—it's still weird.

"The-the ones in h-h-her closet," Tina clears up, blushing. "With my f-ferret teeth."

Kurt raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow at Tina. "Are you sure you're not entertaining more perverse thoughts?" he asks. "We're all friends here. We won't judge you."

"Speak for yourself," Mercedes says, and Artie offhandedly mentions that he's fine with Kurt speaking for him on this issue.

"P-please stop," Tina says, uncomfortable.

"Speaking of crushing on people who don't deserve our attention," Mercedes says, a little forcefully, "has Finn—" Rachel's breath hitches. It's ridiculous; even if Mercedes had noticed, she wouldn't tell anyone. Would she? But then Mercedes goes on, "—moved to Santana's side permanently, or does he plan on gracing us poor sidekicks with his presence at some point?"

"You're not a sidekick," Kurt says. "Quit stealing our status." Mercedes flicks him on the arm.

"Seriously," Mercedes says, and sneaks a glance at Tina, "I kinda miss his big dumb face."

"I miss his produce. Cafeteria food is no good for my skin."

"He has a girlfriend now," Rachel says, casual as she can be, biting into a piece of bread.

"So what?" Mercedes says.

Rachel shrugs.

*
When Mr. Schuester announces they're working in fours the next day, Rachel assumes having Finn and Santana around will make Quinn go easier on her, but it's even worse. Not because of Quinn—she does hold her anger back more successfully than usual—but because Finn and Santana are sickeningly handsy, brushing fingers and wrists when they exchange sheets of paper or pens or words in each other's ears. Rachel spends half the class holding back the grimace that threatens to settle on her face and which would give Quinn a perfect opportunity to work Rachel's feelings for Finn into the conversation—which is already less work-related than Rachel is comfortable with—and the other half thinking before speaking, moving, doing anything, so that there's no easy way for Quinn to freeze any vital body parts.

The thing is, she's not jealous. She's not jealous of Santana—Rachel's power is so much better, and besides, Santana's been nothing but nice to her since she began dating Finn, like she's the kind of girlfriend who wants to be friends with his friends rather than drive them away from him—and she's not jealous of Finn, not really. Rachel is a firm believer in setting those you love free and letting them come crawling back to you—or not. In not caring either way, as long as they're happy. And if Finn is thinking about girls but not about Rachel, then it's a good thing she never told him how she felt. At least she gets to keep him as a friend.

And Santana, too, to Rachel's perpetual surprise. Every time Santana lends her notes—good ones—or sends one of her duplicates to fix a piece she broke in lab or holds Quinn's arm back before Quinn freezes the ink in Rachel's pen, Rachel has to take a figurative step back and remember that it's not sudden—that Santana is actually a nice person when she's not dealing with people she believes are inferior to her. Which makes her less of a nice person, but not in the way that's currently relevant to Rachel Berry.

It's always so astonishing that Rachel is already sitting in the cafeteria when she realizes Santana dragged her all the way to the popular kids' table and her chair is right between Santana and that kid who could turn into a rock monster—Ruck? Puck? Something along those lines.

"I'm so glad you're eating with us today," Santana says, carefully peeling silver foil off a sandwich. "Finn really missed you. I was starting to worry he'd ditch me to spend time with you—but you're a good friend. I know it's a little selfish of me to say, but this is a much more pleasing arrangement."

Rachel would agree—she's not ditching the sidekicks; this is just a one-time thing, and she could easily sit here a couple of days each week and with Mercedes and the others the rest, which would work out well for everyone—except Quinn keeps glaring at Rachel every time there's a lull in her conversation with Brittany, and she's pretty sure the fries on her tray are slowly vanishing without Rachel having touched a single one. Every few minutes she feels a tug in her hair or a kick in the shin with no apparent culprit in sight, and that makes the arrangement not as pleasurable as Santana claimed it would be.

It's not difficult to assume Quinn is behind it all—maybe she's not the one doing it, pulling stupid pranks on Rachel just because she allowed her best friend's girlfriend to drag her to this table, but Quinn is definitely the one orchestrating it, and Rachel can't stand the thought of a year where she has to be on the lookout for people trying to freeze her tongue or hug her to death or steal her lunch.

That particular problem—and how Finn is on some sort of a study date with Santana and everyone else is busy cramming for a Hero Support test—is why Rachel finds herself sitting in her usual booth at Barbra's, sipping on a cappuccino with an unhealthy amount of whipped cream on top, Trigonometry book open on the table.

And she's always loved this place, but she's not here despite the fact that she's crashing the last hour of Quinn Fabray's afternoon shift. She's here because, let's be honest, whatever their teachers think, there is no way they can talk anything out at school. For one thing, Rachel likes to pay attention in class, and for another, Quinn has a reputation to uphold at school. After two months of contradictory actions and statements, Rachel has no idea what kind of reputation that is, but she knows it wouldn't benefit from Quinn working out her fabricated issues with Rachel where everyone can see.

Quinn glowers when their eyes lock, but it's a lot softer and less threatening than the glares she shoots Rachel at school.

"Oh, it's you," Quinn spits half-heartedly from halfway across the room, strutting towards Rachel's booth, coffee pot in hand. It sounds and looks like a prelude to lowering her guard enough to talk to Rachel without anyone calling the authorities on them. "What are you doing here?"

"I like this place," Rachel says inanely, because she does. She's been coming here for years, she's met the owner's children, she's served the occasional cup of coffee when the place was packed, and it's a little disturbing that Quinn insists on questioning her presence. "It's clean and well-lit without hurting my eyes and, up until two weeks ago, it had the best service in the area."

Quinn takes a deep breath, like it's really painful for her to not be horrible to Rachel for two minutes, and walks back to the bar to pour herself a cup of black coffee before sliding into the seat across Rachel. Rachel barely has the strength to refrain from remarking upon just how short the skirt Quinn is wearing under her Barbra's midnight blue apron is, because she's trying to conduct a civil conversation here, and Rachel knows better than to think criticizing Quinn's sense of fashion will do anything for that particular goal.

"What do you want?" Quinn asks, sounding more resigned than hostile, like the sizzling coffee has melted her icy insides a little.

Rachel has a plan. It consists in figuring out how to approach Quinn before doing so, which means it is now perfectly useless. She's gotten as far as maybe starting by questioning the nature of the relatively agreeable conversation they had the other day, except it's entirely possible Quinn only didn't stick an icicle through Rachel's chest because it would have gotten her fired, or because her having a job was a secret and she'd been caught off-guard.

Still, it's better than nothing, so she asks, "Why were you nice to me on Monday?"

"I wasn't trying to be nice to you. I was being a 'commendable hostess'." The vaguely vexed inflection in her tone makes the words sound like something Quinn's had repeated to her a million times—Rachel guesses that's what you get for having a dad who mingles with high hero society. Even her dads have gone to a few of his parties.

"Right," Rachel says, unconvinced. But then, did she really expect a tearful tale of redemption to follow such a ridiculous question? This was definitely the wrong course of action.

"And I was having a bad day," Quinn goes on, the overly casual, dismissive attitude mixed with a little bit of pointedness, but not entirely void of amusement. "I was too exhausted to change my helpful-waitress routine on a customer-by-customer basis." She wraps her fingers lightly around her cup of coffee, fingertips barely brushing the olive green porcelain. Her nails are clipped and clean, not at all threatening.

She doesn't look like she's hiding a large kitchen knife behind her back anymore, either, so Rachel lets herself chuckle. "Helpful-waitress routine?"

"Barbra's words, not mine," Quinn says, tasting her coffee. She grimaces after the first two short sips, running her tongue over her upper lip like she got burned, and then, in a pretty suspicious move—someone needs to teach her how to be inconspicuous when using her power—she jiggles her fingers over the cup. Whatever she does isn't visible, but her next sip is longer and unguarded. "It was part of my training."

Rachel raises her eyebrows, watches Quinn drink in silence, and ends up closing her book in case she has to run off when she says what she came here to say.

Quinn notices and says, fake-cheerful, "You're leaving us? So soon?"

"Look," Rachel says, cutting down to the chase, because all this small talk is just wasting her studying time, "I know a truce doesn't imply being openly pleasant towards each other, but I never did anything to you," and she hopes Quinn understands why Rachel emphasized the singular pronouns, "and I have nothing against you, and I don't mind if you hate me as long as you don't freeze me, but, if you could maybe not sabotage everything I do at school, I would appreciate that."

Quinn stops mid-sip. She swallows, says, "Well, that was subtle," and puts the cup down. She doesn't look pleased.

"Subtlety never got anyone anywhere," Rachel reasons, and after a minute or two—along the course of which Quinn's expression goes from perplexed to offended to offensive and back to bewilderment—she stands up, gathers her things and says, "Just think about it," and, as an afterthought, adds, "Please," which comes out polite instead of completely pathetic.

And then she walks out, before Quinn can do something Rachel will regret having waited around for.

*
Rachel expects Santana's attention to diminish now that she's pissed Quinn off for good, and she's mostly okay with that. As long as Santana doesn't feel the need to hate her again—and she already got Finn, and Rachel hasn't even tried to be an obstacle in their relationship; a part of her has warmed up to Santana, and can remain rational for long enough to admit Santana is a good girlfriend, not one who will mess Finn up—Rachel can live just fine without a rich and popular BFF. She has the sidekicks, anyway. She likes the sidekicks. For once in her life, losing a friend—who wasn't even really one yet—won't leave her totally friendless.

Which is why she's kind of confused when Santana intercepts her on her way to the sidekicks' table and gleefully asks her to join them—her and Finn—for lunch. She goes because—well, she sneaks a glance at the sidekick table for advice and, while Mercedes appears a little irritated, Kurt gives her a thumbs up and everyone else shrugs, so it's not a problem where they're concerned—and because maybe this means Quinn is actually considering her request, and it would be stupid of Rachel to imply that she doesn't care.

She doesn't care about Quinn, obviously, but she cares about leading a peaceful existence. Actual supervillains aside, that is, although, all things considered, there being no supervillains in the world would give Rachel the chance, in the future, to work on environmental issues. Maybe find the solution to global warming. Get her face on the cover of the New York Times. Save the world, in other words, which she fully intends to do one way or another.

For now, she sits at the corner nearest the aisle, next to Santana and right opposite Mike and Puck, and listens to Santana talk to Quinn and some other cheerleaders about a sleepover of some sort—which she calls 'a girls' night in'—that Rachel predicts she'll have to reject Santana's invitation for, and well, that's new.

Not so new is how, a few minutes afterwards, she's halfway through a bite when she feels a hand squeeze her knee.

She looks up and openly glares at Mike, who pretends to be absorbed in a conversation with Brittany—Rachel has it on good authority that Brittany is a worse than mediocre conversationalist, and Mike may be a tool, but he's not dumb—and, when she looks back down, her tray has vanished.

"Guys," she says firmly. She could conjure up another storm and wind their food away. "Give it back."

"Seriously," Santana agrees, "how old are you? Do I have to tell you to play nice?"

Rachel shrugs and ignores the overstretched fingers tugging at her clothes and pinching her ankles throughout the rest of lunch hour, and she's about to leave when Quinn feigns a cough so loud and determined the entire table and the two surrounding it falls silent.

Quinn turns to Mike without ever making eye contact or even looking at Rachel; she just lifts her chin, squares out her shoulders in an authoritative but not dictatorial way, and says:

"Everyone already thinks I'm going to turn out to be evil, guys. Stop giving them circumstantial proof."

It sounds contrived—like an order the others are, to an extent, allowed to ignore—and it does nothing to quiet Rachel's nerves, even though they leave her alone, and Santana talks to her even more than she did yesterday. She even drops a few hints about how Rachel would really enjoy a girls' night in, like she doesn't plan on taking no for an answer, and Quinn doesn't say a word about, either for or against Santana's wishes.

It's funny how things change.

*
She's compelled to ask Quinn about her change in attitude straight away, but it takes her a few days of lunch with the sidekicks and freaking out over her workload to grab her Mad Science homework and head over to Barbra's. It's not fear, just—giving Quinn space. It worked last time, and Rachel is the kind of person who takes note of both her mistakes and her successes.

She's not done taking her books out of her backpack when she hears kitten heels approach her booth.

It's odd that it's Quinn rather than Barbra who takes Rachel's order, because the place is nowhere near busy and Barbra's favorite part of the job is human interaction, but Rachel takes the chance to start things off on a positive note.

"Thanks for getting Mike and the others to back off," Rachel says sincerely. "I appreciate it."

"You seem to appreciate a lot of things," Quinn says, and walks off with a swagger. It's not a straight-out insult, though, so Rachel counts it as a win. If Quinn is annoyed by Rachel's attempts to keep a civil acquaintance with Quinn, well, Rachel can't really feel guilty about that.

Besides, ever since Santana's decided to be friendly—actively friendly, not just nice but even sweet—her natural quota for guilt is fully occupied by the fact that she's into someone unavailable. Someone who, for all intents and purposes, is Rachel's newest friend's boyfriend, which makes it even worse than when Finn was just Rachel's best friend, and that was bad enough. So any efforts towards emotional reformation that Rachel might conduct in the near future, she's decided, should focus on getting over Finn. Now that she knows Santana a little bit better, she can understand what Finn sees in her, and she doesn't want to lose either one of them as a friend, so it's better if she just gives up while she's ahead and forgets about it.

They're only fifteen, anyway. It's not like anyone meets their true love at fifteen. Letting go of her romantic feelings for Finn seems easier when she rationalizes them—like, she'd very much like to have a boyfriend, and she already feels comfortable with Finn, and it seems right to take that step, in theory, but in practice, Finn is really obvious about everything, and Rachel thinks she would have caught a hint if he'd sent any—she would have been sure he returned her feelings way before he clued into them, even. But she has nothing.

And, well, also in theory, when she thinks about the two of them finally confessing their possibly nonexistent feelings for each other, she has a lot of trouble visualizing a kiss. Like it's just not meant to happen. It could be that her subconscious doesn't want to tamper with her enjoyment of the real thing, but it could also be that she's misinterpreting a strong friendship.

And Rachel thinks you're supposed to want to kiss your crush, at least.

She hasn't even opened her notebook when Quinn comes back with her coffee and raspberry cupcake, and proceeds to sit down right in front of Rachel.

Rachel frowns, and continues to look confused until Quinn lets out an exasperated breath and says, "I know you like this place, but, believe it or not, I can tell you're here to see me, so let's just get it over with."

Rachel purses her lips, trying for ingenuous. "I just wanted to say thanks and have a cupcake, that's all."

"I never do this," Quinn says firmly, but not meeting Rachel's eyes. "I never, ever do this. But I thought about some of the things you've said in the past few weeks, and what you said to me before the fight in the cafeteria, and I realized that Santana's dad, he was the prosecutor in the case against my mom—or Countess Crusade, whatever—and I never took it out on her. I think I just saw you, and saw you that you didn't have your powers yet, and you were an easy target."

Rachel nods, biting her lower lip. It's probably not the time to get offended because someone thought she'd torture Rachel just because Rachel was weak. "Okay," she says instead, tonelessly.

"Look," Quinn goes on, "the memories I have of my mom—they're really blurry, okay? I don't have a good reason to believe she shouldn't be in solitary, and I have articles and stuff narrating the disasters she caused, but she's my mom, and she was taken away from me, and I never got to know her, never got to know if she was really that bad—she was never bad to me—but," and she stops, takes a long gulping breath, and goes on, "but you were right. I shouldn't blame you for it."

"It's okay," Rachel says, evaluating her options. She can't go back and avoid what happened between them, and she'd rather avoid any possible future confrontations with Quinn Fabray. It's not like either one of them would get anything out of it—their enmity is virtually imaginary, born of inertia and clichés. So instead of leaving, or telling Quinn to go, she says, "I never got to know my mother either," because Quinn's shared something with her, and it seems appropriate to share something in return.

"Whirl Girl, mental hospital, right?" Quinn asks. "I try to avoid reading stories from those days, but it doesn't always work."

Rachel chuckles. "Schizophrenia, yeah. If I had a specific someone to blame for that, and I could relieve my frustration by tormenting their children, I would have felt compelled to do the same."

"Really," Quinn says, more a show of disbelief than a question.

"I wouldn't have done anything to them, obviously," Rachel says, and Quinn nods, amused. "But I would have wanted to. So I can relate, to an extent."

Quinn looks at Rachel for a few seconds, like she's trying to find something in her face, a sign that Rachel's out to deceive her or something, and then she seems to relax. She even leans back in the booth, and nods. "You never talked to her?"

"Not really," Rachel says. "She just gave me to my dads and left without another word. Well, she left her uniform. Wrapped me in it. Never used her power again."

Quinn cracks a small smile. "You still have her uniform?"

"Yeah, sort of," Rachel says. "Not in the sense that I use it as a blanket or have even tried it on, but my dads kept it in case she ever needed it back. St—I guess you know him by Rock Ant? He's kind of superstitious and thought throwing it away would jinx her possible eventual recovery."

"So it's in a drawer somewhere?"

"Glass case. In the sanctum." She corrects herself, "I mean, the basement."

The door clicks open, and Quinn stands up instinctively. "That's cool," she says, like she suddenly has no idea what she was doing talking to Rachel Berry. Then, "If you wait until closedown, we can talk about—well, you know we're probably going to get paired up for Save the Citizen, and I'd rather not make a spectacle of myself just because we're not on the same page, so we should probably—talk. About that. But I have to—" She makes a vague gesture with her hand that might mean 'work', or 'go', but also might mean 'kill a few innocent children', and walks off.

Rachel chooses to interpret it as the former, and sets her homework out on the table before her coffee gets cold.

*
Life is foreseeably quiet and uneventful until Rachel gets pulled out of the crowd in the gym to do her round of Save the Citizen.

Save the Citizen is somewhat stupid, as educational competitions go, because there's no way that a supervillain would craft such a ridiculous and unprofitable plan as this in real life. A citizen—and it's not even a real person they have to save, it's a dummy—suspended over a pit of gigantic, moving bear traps is just not viable in a crowded city. For something like this to happen, everyone would have to turn a blind eye to a herd of henchmen building a hollow pool in an intersection or a major square, and then filling it with sharp metal. Not to mention hanging someone over it would need a roof, and a pit this big wouldn't fit in a basement, let alone leave space to spare for a person to slowly descend to his death instead of being fully puréed within a few seconds.

But they get to work on their reflexes, and supervillains are stupid, because, yeah, heroes are supposed to stick to the handbook, legally speaking, but supervillains are not, and they still do. Like it makes their evilness seem more respectable—exemplary for other supervillains, dashing and clever to the masses—when in reality it just rips their plans apart.

The point is, it's Rachel's turn now, and as she climbs down the stairs towards the stage—gym floor, whatever—she hears Coach Sylvester call out Quinn Fabray, which is just predictable. And Rachel was and is ready for this. They both are.

They're up against Puck's giant rock monster—which, again, in a real-life situation, would be more likely to cut the rope hanging the citizen over the pit of deathly blades than wait around and fight, but Rachel does understand why it doesn't work that way—and Mike Chang's inconceivably flexible limbs, which shouldn't be that hard, because it's against the rules to grab the dummy and throw it in the pit, so he can only use his power to throw them around.

Which he does. Gladly. They've been undefeated for three days straight, since they beat Artie's surprisingly capable artifacts and Mercedes's balls of fire, and their strategy is always the same, which, in Rachel's opinion, inevitably makes it a bad strategy.

Because, when Rachel finds herself flown around the gym before she's even set foot on it, it's even easier to call up a rainstorm and a rush of wind through the windows she had the chance to open when she was being thrashed around just seconds earlier. The raindrops do their job, converging around Mike's arms, held up against gravity by a blanket of wind, and Quinn only has to use one hand to turn those raindrops into an ice cylinder, immobilizing Mike completely—and hopefully for long enough to do what she plans to do.

She remains held in the air, hands extremely cold but not quite frozen around her waist, pulling on a pair of thick gloves as she watches Quinn freeze Puck's rock monster in place and Puck break out of the ice and take another step towards the center of the stadium, only for Quinn to freeze him in place again. If Rachel was a rock monster, she'd probably go for the take-everyone-down-before-they-get-to-the-dummy approach, but Puck's has worked out great so far—and that's why Quinn is not letting him near the pit.

Okay, the coast is clear. Enough of the observation. This is risky, so she has to concentrate. Mike is standing near the pit, arms raised, his power not quite useful against being frozen, and his right arm arches over the pit and the dummy, pretty much the perfect angle for this. All these years of training may not have given Rachel superstrength, but they've given her stability and flexibility, and she can hold a dummy with her legs, easy.

That's what she's thinking—that and a string of come on, you can do this, don't be a coward, Rock Ant remained undefeated throughout the entire second half of the competition his freshman year—when she wraps her forearms around Mike's wrist and squirms out of his hold.

Everything after that is kind of a blur, gliding way too fast along Mike's arm, gloves keeping her own hands from freezing but not from feeling the burning mist steaming from the ice, and it's a miracle that she has the strength of mind to grip the dummy with her legs before either one of them grazes the blades below them, successfully pulling it and herself out of danger—and collapsing right into Mike Chang.

She shakes her head into consciousness; when she looks around, she notices the scoreboard, first—they've won! Of course they've won, she saved the citizen—and then Quinn, who's looking at her nails and regularly—rhythmically—wriggling the fingers of her other hand to freeze Puck every time he breaks out of the ice.

At least until Puck turns back into Puck and glares at her.

"I know you have a crush on me," Quinn says, "but could you be a little less obvious about it?"

"What the fuck," Puck starts saying, scowling, before the umpire shushes him and drags him back to the bleachers.

"That worked out pretty well, I thought," Quinn says to Rachel once they're out of the stadium. Rachel's not sure why they're walking down the hall together, except for inertia—they got held back at the gym so Principal Figgins could fill them in on the rules of keeping other students from saving the citizen, so now the halls are empty, like defeating Puck and Mike wasn't much of a feat and doesn't deserve a warm welcome.

"It was a good plan," Rachel says honestly, because she can admit it when someone else has a good idea, and—okay, she doesn't hate Quinn that much.

"Now why don't you make it sunny again?" Quinn asks, more playful than commanding. She even smiles as she adds, "The cold tends to chafe my lips."

It's new, Quinn's tone—it's warm and friendly, like she's letting herself be for once instead of maintaining her tough façade—and when did Rachel start thinking of Quinn's behavior as a façade? There is no such thing as a façade. Even the terrible ones, they come from within—they're a facet of someone's personality. Quinn not being openly hostile right now doesn't mean she's suddenly a good person.

"Sure," she says anyway, "stand back."

Quinn does, stepping around Rachel, looking at the school doors over Rachel's shoulder, and Rachel only has to focus for a moment—ignore Quinn's breath on her neck, ignore that Quinn's fingertips are brushing her elbow, because that's normal, that's normal if they're becoming friends—before the rain subsides and the sky gradually brightens up.

"That was cool," Quinn admits, voice kind of rough, and Rachel turns around, and—wow, they really are close. No wonder she could feel Quinn's breath on her skin. Quinn's hand is still wrapped around Rachel's elbow, barely touching, and, when Rachel looks up, her lips are parted, her lids drooping, and Rachel takes a step back, dizzy. She means to turn back towards the doors and keep walking, go home already, but Quinn is still holding her, looking down—at Rachel's mouth, if Rachel's perspective isn't totally skewed, and Rachel barely has a second to discern what's about to happen before Quinn leans in and presses their lips together.

Rachel's not sure what compels her to kiss back—cowardice, maybe, fear that pushing Quinn away will shatter all the progress they've made in the past two weeks, or just inertia—but she does, gently, balmy and unfocused like the rays of sunlight reflecting on the lockers down the hall, and it's Quinn who pulls back after a while, looking petrified in front of Rachel's confusion, and Rachel thinks that should be her, she should be the one who's taken aback and scared, not Quinn. Quinn is the one who kissed her.

"This did not happen," Quinn whispers, more like she's talking to herself than to Rachel, though there's a certain threatening hint in her voice, a don't tell anyone or I will murder you in your sleep, and Rachel would ask, she would totally ask what just happened, or did not, if Quinn hadn't already walked out.

Because, if there's something Rachel's learned from having a crush on her best friend, is that these things are not accidents. If they were, she would have accidentally kissed Finn already. She would be underground, dead of embarrassment. But she's not, and this—this wasn't an accident. Quinn deliberately stood close and leaned in. She must have thought—who knows what, but if Quinn has decided it was a mistake—which it was, Rachel can believe that—and Rachel can't get an answer, it might as well never had happened.

Except it did, and Rachel's never been any good at leaving things unexplained.

*
It's just as well that she can't get a moment alone with Quinn, and Quinn clearly doesn't want whatever brought the kiss about to get out, and Rachel has no idea what she wants to get out of Quinn. It's not something she's really thought about—she sort of assumed it was statistically improbable that she'd be into girls, what with the two dads and everything, and then she realized she liked Finn and it stopped being an issue. Not that a lack of romantic feelings for her best friend would have been an issue, per se—as a matter of fact, it would have spared her a great deal of emotional trouble—but it definitely would have led her to spend a lot more time trying to figure herself out.

What she means is, the only thing she's ever consciously wanted from Quinn was civility and respect, and there are many things she has consciously not wanted from her, but it has never occurred to Rachel not to want this. She didn't, obviously she didn't; when Rachel wants something, she's invariably aware of it. Painfully so.

But it wasn't a bad kiss—it was her first, so she has nothing to compare it to, and oh God, her first kiss was one she has to pretend never even happened?—but it was nice. And maybe it wasn't nice for Quinn and that's why she'd rather erase it from her memory, but Rachel finds it hard to believe that something that was so far from a disaster on her end would seem catastrophic to Quinn, who, by the way, was the one who started it.

So Rachel would like to talk to Quinn about it, but Quinn has gotten good at dodging Rachel—impressively so, considering they're lab partners and sit near each other in maybe half of their classes. Even more impressive is the fact that they have managed to keep the citizen from being saved for a week without actually talking to each other; Rachel's attempts at conversation have consistently fizzled out into monologue, and she's had to resort to plans scribbled on napkins and torn corners of pages, passed back and forth over tests and cups of coffee.

Quinn hasn't frozen any of those things, though, and she hasn't backtracked to hostility mode, so it can't be that bad. Thinking back on it, it's entirely possible it was an accident. It's been scientifically proved that both keeping your power on for a long while and using it over and over and over within a limited amount of time can cause dizziness and loss of awareness, among other things. Maybe Quinn didn't know that—not everyone has been raised by environmentally conscious, diligently busy, currently active heroes such as Rachel's dads.

The thing is, she wants to talk to Quinn, and that's the only reason Rachel says yes when Santana asks her to come over to her house later and join her little study group. Rachel doesn't normally need help with her homework, but, if she did, Mercedes and Finn and even the sidekicks, despite the fact that they're taking different classes, would probably be more helpful than Santana's practically illiterate friends. In Saving the World the other day, one of them asked Rachel how you said good morning in French, and she was a certified junior. Sure, she can strangle people and steal things without leaving fingerprints, but is that reason enough to pass her when she doesn't deserve it? It's so cowardly and despicable. The school is supposed to be run by heroes.

Anyway, she probably won't get anything done, but she might get the chance to talk to Quinn before things get worse, and that's definitely worth an afternoon.

*
As things go, it's not the worst afternoon of her life.

She brings Tina and Mercedes along—because it's an all-girls thing, because they're Rachel's friends, and because Tina is the only person Rachel knows who could lie about an unfairly early curfew without Santana questioning the validity of her claim. It's sad and it's prejudiced, sure, but in this situation it is also something Tina's willing to use to their advantage.

"Tell me why we're here again?" Tina asks, voice thin, as they turn into Santana's street.

"We're making friends," Rachel says in her best revolution-leading voice.

"No, you're making friends," Mercedes clarifies, nodding firmly. "We are here in case those friends try to eat you."

"Don't be so dramatic, Mercedes," Rachel says. "They're your peers too."

That earns her a glower, but at least it puts that topic to rest. Besides, it's not like Rachel is flat-out lying: there is a chance, albeit small, that putting an honorary sidekick and a real one in a room full of popular heroes who are set on acting like civilized people for the afternoon will lead them all to patch up their differences. It's activism at its simplest. At its dumbest, too. But it could happen.

The door's flung open before they even get the chance to knock, and Santana yells at them to come in from an undetermined location behind the stairs.

The place doesn't really look different from the last time Rachel saw it—it feels different, because that was a party and this is a quiet afternoon. There's low, unintrusive instrumental music pouring from the speakers in the corner of the living room, and a handful of sophomore girls from Sky High are sitting around the fake fireplace—some of them on one of the two couches, holding books in their laps, and some of them on the carpet, scribbling on their notebooks over the low coffee table.

Quinn is occupying an armchair, with Brittany kneeling on the floor beside her, eyes on the book open over the armrest, which Rachel recognizes as regarding a second-year history elective. Quinn's face is firmly set on determined, like she's long since decided she's not leaving that armchair until Brittany truly understands what life was like for a publicly active female superhero in the nineteen fifties. Her legs are folded under her, bare feet poking out under the hem of her jeans, and all in all she just seems bizarrely unguarded and at ease.

Rachel doesn't realize she's smiling until Quinn looks up at her, the beginning of a thin smile beginning to form around her lips before Quinn violently stops it and dodges eye contact more or less successfully.

"What is wrong with you?" Mercedes asks, sounding somewhat preoccupied under layers and layers of cynicism.

"Nothing is wrong with me," Rachel says. "I'm in an appropriately apprehensive mood, that's all."

Mercedes raises an eyebrow. "Whatever," she says, and steps around Rachel to link arms with Tina, and the two of them walk into the living room in a rather defensive motion. Santana's friends look up and do a double take. There's a second when Rachel thinks they're going to try to kick at least Tina out, but then something like recognition seems to settle over their faces and they say hi. The smiles are contrived, but don't look entirely fake.

Santana must have given them a hell of a pep talk.

While Mercedes and Tina find a place to sit—not difficult, considering the amount of padded furniture—Santana's voice comes in from the—kitchen, Rachel thinks—again, this time calling Rachel's name. Rachel makes her way there easily; the kitchen takes up the entire space to the right of the staircase, and there are doors at each side of it, plus the double doors leading into the backyard on the opposite wall.

Santana's standing precariously on a stool over the sink, one knee on the counter and an arm digging around the contents—saucepans, bowls, pie plates, baking sheets—of the cupboard overhead.

"Hey, Rachel, hi," Santana says breathlessly, pointing at the fully occupied counter with her elbow. "Could you do me a tiny little favor and move all that stuff aside? Like, to the island?"

"Sure," Rachel says. It's harder to get around Santana than it was to find the kitchen, but she manages, and the counter is clear after a few trips. It occurs to her that Santana would have been better off calling Quinn, given that Quinn is the one who moonlights as a barista and waitress, but maybe they're treating Quinn's job as a secret identity. It's not really the kind of thing someone like Santana would boast about, after all.

"Thanks," Santana says, as an afterthought, and keeps investigating in the cupboard. She doesn't tell Rachel to leave, which Rachel takes to mean she might be needed in the near future, so she leans back against the counter and thanks her lucky stars she doesn't have to deal with Quinn right now—which is a surprise, because she likes Quinn. As a friend, at least. And she wants to fix this, so avoiding her is hardly the way to go.

"So," Rachel says, raising her voice over the loud metallic noises, "where's everybody?"

Santana grunts and pulls a wire rack out before answering. "The—living room; you didn't see them?"

"No—I mean, yeah, I did see them, but—where are your parents?"

Santana looks down with a frown, like she's half surprised, half amused Rachel's asking. "Business trip," she says. "Well, technically, my dad's spending the week at a spa up in Vermont, but, you know, same thing." She stops to clutch a huge popcorn bowl and hand it down to Rachel. "Here, hold this—" she says inanely, and Rachel grabs it about a second before it would have slipped off Santana's fingers.

It actually weighs more than it looked like it might, and Rachel has to cradle it with both hands to get a proper hold of it before carrying it to the far side of the counter, near the microwave.

"Don't tell me you want parental supervision on this," Santana says, stifling a laugh, stretching her back further up and groaning at the pressure instead. It doesn't sound like she's arguing or trying to convince Rachel—it sounds like she finds the whole thing horribly—but refreshingly—amusing. "It's a girls' afternoon in. I cannot think of anything more innocuous than a girls' afternoon in." She laughs this time, a soft puff of breath. Her eyes smile down at Rachel, and Rachel has to admit Santana has a point. "A girls' afternoon in studying," Santana goes on, an afterthought, digging in the cupboard again. "Studying even though midterms aren't even remotely close."

"I get it, I get it," Rachel interrupts, raising her hands in mock surrender.

"Good," Santana says warmly. "And, for the record, if you're worried about your little sidekick girlfriends, they'd be way worse off if my parents were here. Trust me." And then she seemingly gives up on her quest and climbs off the kitchen counter and the stool.

"Really?" Rachel asks. She's not sure her curiosity in this matter is welcome, but Santana shrugs easily, like she's more than used to talking about this, and it suddenly dawns on Rachel why Santana never gets into any trouble for tormenting sidekicks and freshmen. She has a sob story.

Except she doesn't sob over it. She just says, matter-of-fact, "Yeah. Overcompensation, you know. My dad always wanted to be a hero, since his sister fell into a vat of toxic waste—he always wished it would have been him. And then he met and married my mom and he was an unemployed lawyer at the time and she was on the board of justice, so he got a job as a villain prosecutor. Dealing with heroes and sidekicks pretty much twenty-four seven kind of went to his head, and he sort of considers himself an honorary hero. Emphasis on hero. He's not a sidekick, he helps heroes, therefore he is one of them."

"That's really faulty logic," Rachel says.

"Tell me about it. So anyway, he's really wary of being associated with lowly sidekicks. Just in case they make him an honorary one and all the work he's done for years and years and years goes to hell. As it were."

Rachel stays silent, leaving a wow unspoken.

"Yeah," Santana says. "Bright side, though? Guys think it's hot," she adds, complete non sequitur, except it sends Rachel's mind reeling over whether Finn finds daddy issues hot.

She hates herself for even thinking it, but it feels like Santana's messing with her. Her story checks out, at least as far as Rachel's dads know about Santana's, but why bring Finn into the conversation? Was that really necessary? Was that—did that actually happen? No. No, wait. Santana was probably talking about guys, plural, guys like Puck and Mike and Matt. Finn is not "guys". Finn is—a guy, but he's Santana's boyfriend. She wouldn't just call him "guys".

Okay, maybe Rachel's not entirely over Finn yet.

Or, or, she is, and she just feels defensive of her longtime best friend, and isn't happy when morally ambiguous things are implied about him.

The corn starts popping in the microwave and snaps her out of it. Definitely not over Finn. She's never been good at lying to herself, anyway. Or lying in general. She's never been good at doing things she considered wrong, which is probably her most annoying trait, and she's been told she has lots of them over the years.

But still Finn stuck with her. With her and the tree in her backyard and her awkwardness for the past few months and her being a moving target for bored self-loathing tweens for the past entirety of her life, and Rachel appreciates that. He's always done right by Rachel; he's always tried to do the right thing. He's not the kind of guy who hooks up with somebody because they have daddy issues. He's a great guy.

It just so happens he has a girlfriend, one who's trying really hard to become a better person and not let the popcorn burn.

Rachel grasps one of the bowls on the kitchen island and hands it to Santana, who smiles like Rachel just saved her life.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," Santana says, shaking her head.

"All those cartwheels mustn't be very good for your equilibrium," Rachel suggests. Santana looks surprised for a second—this may be the first time Rachel's talked to her as an equal instead of as someone in a position of authority over Rachel—but it feels right to Rachel, and Santana seems to deem it appropriate too, because her shocked expression melts easily into a smile and she hands the full bowl back to Rachel and asks her to go on to the living room while Santana cleans up.

Rachel's not even out of the kitchen yet when a huge red blur of Santana's duplicates pops up on the glass door and starts arranging kitchen utensils. Rachel shakes her head and looks up, taking another step, and—

—and Quinn is on the floor now, back to the door, like she knew Rachel would walk in and didn't want to make the mistake of facing her again. And it's ridiculous, because Rachel hasn't done anything that would even imply she doesn't want to talk to Quinn ever again. The assumption itself is preposterous. It was just a kiss. It was good, it was sweet, it was reluctant enough that Rachel could have pulled away if she'd wanted to. It was an offer. And Rachel doesn't have a lot of experience with that sort of offer, but it doesn't seem reasonable to retreat before someone tells you yes or no.

Except—except Rachel never even got that far with Finn. Never said a word because she didn't want to lose him as a friend. In any other circumstances, or if Finn had showed something towards Rachel, Rachel wouldn't have hesitated to face the risk of rejection.

But Quinn and Rachel, they're not friends.

But—they were getting there, Rachel is aware of that. Rachel was the one who was attempting to orchestrate that. And then Quinn kissed her, and regretted it. It's just so hard to believe—or it was so hard to believe before Rachel got the chance to see Quinn in worn-out jeans, looking every bit like a human being. An actual human being—one capable of feeling things.

And, okay, Finn is a good guy. Finn is definitely—great. He's just that good a guy.

It just so happens Rachel doesn't want to kiss him the way she wants to kiss Quinn again right now.

The feeling is so overwhelming it almost feels like her feet are hovering a few inches above the fl—wait. They are. She looks down, and they are. And almost as quickly and surprisingly as they went up, they go back down.

She bounces on the balls of her feet a little, trying to reproduce what just happened, but it doesn't work, so she just walks in and settles next to Tina on a couch, opening her Geography book and flicking through the pages until she finds the one she's looking for.

The thing with studying in the same room as a handful of wannabe cheerleaders—only wannabe because Sky High doesn't really have sport teams or anything to root for other than your own individual friends during Save the Citizen—is you may be completely absorbed in the unit about special routes and transportation for rescue missions of your textbook, but them? They get distracted easily, and Rachel is worried about Tina, so she looks up and gets distracted herself every time.

So far she's only assimilated two paragraphs, and she's been sitting on the couch for almost forty minutes. She has also watched Brittany run so fast around one of Santana's duplicates that it—she—the Santana duplicate in question flew up and ended up hanging from the chandelier. She's watched Quinn freeze-slow down the fall, which made Rachel wonder if Santana's duplicates could actually get hurt and/or die, and would have asked if she'd thought Quinn might deign to answer the question.

She's also noticed Brittany has moved on from the lesson she was going over with Quinn and started braiding Tina's hair. Tina's startled expression hasn't washed off yet, but she looks less likely to run.

So technically it's all going well, if also not really going at all, which is infinitely better than what could have happened. Except Quinn hasn't talked to Rachel yet, and everyone but the two of them looks bored out of their skull, and now Santana's saying something about her mom's inactive operation base and how Santana has already started sketching out the decoration of her future hero headquarters.

"It sucks that we can't have our own until we move out," whines one of Santana's friends, a petite, ordinary-looking brunette who's in Mr. Schuester's class with Rachel.

Brittany snorts. "At least you have one. I got mauled by a mutant panther and what do I get? All of the super speed and none of the equipment."

"I can't believe they won't let you use the computer system at school," Quinn says, seemingly forgetting Rachel's there. "I know it's just for seniors, but you're student body president. You'd think they'd make an exception."

"I know," Brittany says with a pout. "It's not like I want to build a killer laser. I just want to learn how to read an electronic map."

"Oh, hey, now that you mention that," Santana says, beginning to smile, "I totally have one of those. Well, my dad does, to check up on criminals' alibis and stuff. I haven't the faintest idea how to use it, but it's there if you want to take a look."

"That would be awesome," Brittany says excitedly.

Quinn frowns. "Is your dad okay with that?"

"Sure," Santana says, nodding. "It's passive equipment—it just records stuff for evidence—and the database is password-protected anyway." Then her eyes light up, like she just had an idea. "Oh, actually, Rachel might know how to use it. Rachel?"

Rachel shakes her head, startled. "What?"

"Your dads. They save people and catch bad guys all the time, right?"

Rachel smiles proudly. "That's kind of their job, yeah."

"They've already let you in their headquarters, right? I mean, it's traditional for hero parents to show their kids their hero headquarters after the homecoming dance, and you didn't go to that, but—"

Rachel lifts a finger to stop Santana's babbling. "How do you—" know about that, she means to say, but Santana interrupts her.

"Quinn told me about the—thing with Whirl Girl's uniform? In your dads', what do they call it, sanctum? Yeah." Rachel stays silent—she's not sure how she feels about someone like Santana—about someone who is not her dads, or her, or even Finn—talking about a supposedly secret place in her house. A place that contains a lot of stuff that should decidedly stay in there for eternity. "I hope you don't mind I mentioned it. Like, Quinn's dad has an overprotected sanctum too, see? We're all friends here." For a very loose definition of the word 'friends', Rachel thinks. She doesn't actually know the names of a couple of girls in the room. So she actually does mind.

"It's okay," she lies, trying to play it cool. There is absolutely no good reason right now to let people know her dads' sanctum isn't supposed to be public knowledge, or why. "My dad did fill me in on some things, so I can probably help a little."

The computer in question is in a room inside a room on the first floor, the door hidden under a tapestry of motivational posters behind Santana's father's desk. It's just Santana, Brittany, Quinn and Rachel there, which is vaguely strange, but not in a bad way. Or, strange in a bad way because Quinn keeps sneaking sideway glances at Rachel but not really directing words at her, but also strange in a good way because, even if it's not as security-proofed as a real hero base, Santana's dad's computer room isn't a place you can just walk into randomly, and Santana trusts Rachel enough to let her in.

Five minutes in, Rachel realizes that Brittany should start by grabbing a local map from a bookstore and learning the names of the streets she walks by daily, but she still manages to instill some knowledge into Brittany, like how to insert coordinates and have the computer tell you where to go, what route to pick, and how long it's going to take to get there.

Ten minutes in, Brittany hugs Rachel, and Rachel catches an apologetic look on Quinn's face before Quinn's entire body turns away from her.

Fifteen minutes in, there's a green-blob situation showing on the computer screen, and Quinn gets a call from her dad to tell her he's going to be late. "Forest fire," Quinn says, slipping her cellphone back into her pocket.

"I thought your dad had retired," Santana says.

"Not entirely. I know you think he's just a socialite now," Quinn says, not entirely void of bite, "but he does like to help people. And fauna and flora, as the case may be."

"What did your dad do again?" Brittany chimes in, sounding genuinely curious. Rachel guesses that's what you get when you don't know you're going to get powers until you're thirteen, get attacked by freakish wildlife at your aunt's country house and wake up a mutant.

"Hydrodynamics," Quinn says. "Water stuff."

Rachel frowns. "Is that why you don't have a pool?"

"How do you know I don't hav—" Quinn begins, like she's forgotten she's giving Rachel the silent treatment. "Sorry. Parties. Yeah. Yeah, that's why we don't have a pool."

Sixteen minutes in, Rachel can see Quinn is tempted to say more about it—maybe talk about it at length—but doesn't, and she feels a pang of regret in her stomach, like this is what they were heading towards, a real friendship, the kind of friendship Rachel's only come close to having with Finn, and they might have screwed it up before it even started.

Quinn looks slightly relieved, though, just a little less awkward when they go back downstairs, like whatever fear she had has begun to dissipate. For the following thirty minutes or so, Rachel doesn't need anyone else to distract her from her studying, because she's doing an excellent job of it herself—trying to make eye contact with Quinn like she's in the second grade.

The thing is, Quinn dodges that eye contact, but she dodges it because she was looking at Rachel in the first place instead of pretending Rachel wasn't there at all.

So Rachel should probably expect what happens next, but it's still a surprise when Quinn stands to her feet and reminds Santana that she has a two-hour shift at Barbra's, and then turns to Rachel and adds,

"You coming?" Rachel blinks. "I mean, since you've taken up that terrible habit of being there to make me close down later than I'm supposed to, you might as well walk me there to make sure I'm early and work longer than I'm getting paid for too." The words lose their cynical inflection halfway through, probably because Quinn ran out of breath, but maybe because Quinn is underestimating Rachel's ability to detect fake sarcasm.

"Sure," Rachel says. "Not passing up the chance of getting my latte made by Barbra herself while you're changing into your uniform."

A few perfunctory goodbyes and confirmation that Tina and Mercedes are going to be all right later, Rachel's walking down the path from Santana's door to the sidewalk with Quinn, and she's not sure if the cricket chirping is real or the silence is so uncomfortable Rachel's beginning to hallucinate background noise.

"I'm sorry I told Santana about your dads' sanctum," Quinn says the second they step on the sidewalk. She says it quick, like she had to get it out at some point but doesn't want Rachel to wallow in the apology.

"I don't care about th—" Rachel begins, but Quinn shakes her head and cuts her off.

"You do," she says. "I saw your face. I've kind of been watching you all day."

"You've been—watching me?" Rachel asks, not sure how she feels about that.

"Yeah. I mean, not in a creepy, obsessive, have-nothing-better-to-do-than-stalk-Rachel-freaking-Berry way, but like—I thought you'd be uncomfortable around me now."

"I can't really react to something if I don't even know what that something is, Quinn," Rachel says, noticeably raising the volume of the conversation. Her voice feels loud to her own ears.

Quinn squints back at her in a vaguely intimidating way. "What what something is?"

Rachel considers not saying anything. Seriously, she does. Her dads probably have some kind of illegal laser in storage that could alter Rachel's memory, and then the fact that Quinn kissed her won't have to be an issue anymore. It's a possibility.

Just not a very sound one.

"What the ki—"

"Didn't happen," Quinn jumps in. "We might still be able to salvage some of our—friendship or whatever, so don't make this harder than it already is, okay?"

Rachel waits for Quinn to elaborate, but she doesn't, so Rachel has to ask. "Make what harder?"

Quinn lets out a breathy laugh and shakes her head. "Nothing. Just give it a rest, okay?"

It's not until a ten-minute walk and thirty minutes of actually productive studying later that Rachel finds out what Quinn was talking about. After making sure there are no unattended customers left, Quinn heads over to Rachel's booth, carrying a slice of raspberry shortcake as a peace offering.

"So," she begins, straight to the point—though maybe 'straight' isn't the most appropriate term given the circumstances. "I told Santana about the sanctum. I know your dads have valuable things in there, and although most of those things don't rightfully belong to them and I do trust Santana, it wasn't the right thing to do at all—it was a private conversation, and I would have snapped at you if you'd told anyone about anything I said that day, so I'm sorry."

"I already told you, I don't care," Rachel says. "It's not like they can get in anyway."

"No, that's not what I—just hear me out, okay?" Rachel nods. "I don't want to feel like I did wrong by you and never paid for it, so I want to tell you something. And I'm telling you this—piece of information in confidence, and, if it gets out, I will hunt you down. I'm serious. I get enough crap for being Countess Crusade's daughter as it is. The fight in the cafeteria will seem like a picnic in comparison to what I'll do to you."

"Okay, all of a sudden I'm not so sure I want to hear this," Rachel jokes, and belatedly realizes this is the first time she's spoken like this to Quinn.

Quinn must be aware of that too, because she inhales deeply and leans back, shoulders relaxing, lips curving lightly upwards. "All right. Um, you need to take this at face value. There are no ulterior romantic motives in me telling you this."

"Got it." Rachel takes a sip of her latte and puts it down, waits.

"Okay." Quinn takes a deep breath. Rachel has a moment of panic where she thinks Quinn's going to say she's decided to follow in her mother's footsteps and drop out of school in order to pursue her life-long dream of world domination, but what Quinn actually says is this: "Okay. I'm—I'm not, you know."

"Evil?" Rachel offers.

Quinn snickers. "Straight," she clarifies.

"...oh." Oh. And—yeah, Rachel was expecting this, in a way. She's not the best of friends with Quinn, but Quinn apparently wants to be, and Rachel guesses she's not the most difficult person ever to come out to. She may be fifteen years old, but she has two dads she loves very much, and she's friends with Kurt Hummel, so she's not likely to start throwing rocks at a gay person. "Um," she says, because she is so okay with Quinn telling her this that she has to say it, "my dads?"

Quinn snorts and interrupts her. "Are you going to tell me how you don't care because you have two gay dads? Because that may have helped my decision to tell you, but it's not really verifiable logic."

"No," Rachel says firmly. "I was going to say that I only got what you meant to say because I have two gay dads, but you should really reconsider the way you come out to people if you're, you know, trying to come out of the proverbial homosexual closet."

Quinn frowns. "What the hell are you blabbering on about?" she snaps.

"Not blabbering. I'm saying that 'I'm not straight' could mean a lot of things." Quinn frowns, so Rachel elaborates. "It could mean 'I'm asexual'. It could mean 'I've strayed from the path of goodness'. It could mean you're a drug addict. It could mean, given our nature, that you've recently acquired a power that makes your bones flexible. From what little I've gathered talking to my dads about their encounters with the press, you really want to be clear from the get-go lest the person you're coming out to concocts a story that is preposterous yet perfectly supported by a choice statement or two you made on the record."

Quinn blinks. "Wow. You really are deranged," but she's reluctantly smiling as she gets up to attend to the couple who just arrived, and when Rachel asks Barbra for a new straw, thanks for the tip is scrawled on the paper wrapping.

So that doesn't solve the mystery of the kiss—unless Quinn was trying to ascertain her suspected lesbianism by kissing a girl, any girl, which Rachel doubts is the right measuring system—but at least Quinn won't be avoiding her anymore. In any other circumstances, that would be a very bad thing—along the years, she's had a lot of people like Quinn that she wished would ignore her and just wouldn't—but, in this case, Rachel feels relieved. Slightly confused, but relieved. Because now she has something to hold over Quinn's head, and it's something Quinn freely volunteered, something that settles some sort of imaginary information-swapping score Rachel wasn't aware they were keeping.

She theorizes, then, that relief itself might be the feeling that prompts her to fly; her dad John told her once that for a number of years he couldn't feel a certain level of doubt without his feet lifting right off the ground, and Rachel breathes in so deep and happy as she walks back home that at one particular point she accidentally burns her fingertips with the red flash of a street light. It doesn't cause any actual wounds, and it's not scary. It's not something Rachel wants to rush, either. She doesn't mind letting the power grow at its own pace, surprisingly.

She lands all right, too, not so much a flight come to a halt as the burst of superpower steadily fizzling out into a walk, right on back home.

*
Things settle down after that. Rachel divides her time—her lunches and afternoons and study sessions and movie nights—between the sidekicks and Santana's friends, who have moved on from playing pranks on a freshman to organizing complicated schemes to embarrass the principal during public announcements over the intercom.

There's even some overlap: if Rachel spends more lunch hours around the sidekicks than around the popular kids, Finn is the other side of that coin; you can sort of assume he's going to follow Santana to their usual spot at any given moment, but there's always the variable of him wanting to talk to Artie about lab stuff, or provide Tina and Kurt with fresh fruit, or keep Mercedes from glowering at him in the hallways for deserting the sidekicks, and those days Finn deviates from Santana's path and into Rachel's.

That's normal, really, once you get past the absurdity of a kid like Finn wanting to maintain his friendship with a bunch of sidekicks. The strange kind of overlap happens when a friend of Mike's, Matt, notices Rachel is going to have lunch at his usual table and makes a beeline for Rachel's empty seat at the sidekicks', or, even more bizarrely, when Tina, instead of making a burrow out of her chair, takes the opportunity to sit in Matt's usual place, next to Quinn, opposite Finn. Rachel's still trying to figure out how to ask Tina what she's doing, though her best guess is it's less frightening to invade your enemy's lines than to have yours invaded by your enemy.

The greatest thing is that nobody says a word. They're all thinking it, Rachel knows they are, wondering if it's really a good idea to let their minions mingle—and if Kurt and Mercedes weren't Kurt and Mercedes, Rachel would easily believe that line of thought only goes on in Brittany and Santana and Puck's heads, but she knows her friends better than that—but nobody moves a finger to avoid it, which is somewhat heartwarming if you care about social hierarchy and politics, which Rachel does.

The point is, Rachel makes at least a weekly appearance at the popular kids' table, and sometimes visits Quinn at work to make up for not seeing her enough outside of class. It still feels weird, going to Barbra's to see somebody for no reason other than to—see them. But Quinn has softened around Rachel now, enough so that Rachel doesn't feel an impulse to run at the sight of her anymore, and it's—good. It's something Rachel looks forward to, even if she still keeps her sarcastic streak ready to resurface at the tiniest sign of Quinn's sadistic vein.

So that's her routine. Not entirely predictable, not planned down to the minute, but there is a list of things on Rachel's cork board, a list of activities to do every week to keep her unusually regular social life from crumbling down to shreds, and after a few days Rachel finds she doesn't need it at all. She just keeps it up and updated for the joy of crossing tasks out.

It's good. It's really good. Everything is going great, which is why Rachel understands the feeling of emptiness, almost panic nagging in her chest: she's run out of short-term goals. She needs to get some new ones.

Still—maybe not now. Maybe she can enjoy the peace while it lasts. After all, she's already planted the seed for trouble: she's explicitly thought 'everything is going great, what could possibly go wrong?', which means a disaster has naturally been born and is set to surface when she least expects it.

Rachel is all about plans and to-do lists, but, as they say, unpredictability is the mother of hero training, and Rachel would do anything—even waiting—to hone her abilities.

*
November rolls around in a mist of hail and a dizzying circle of requests for Rachel to meddle with the weather a bit, make it warmer. She can't listen to them; on the one hand, yes, seasonal changes are nature's life, and Rachel believes in nature—Nature, maybe, capitalized. Rachel was gifted with her ability by Nature itself, and you don't bite the hand that feeds you.

That's not why she smiles politely and keeps walking, though. The truth is, Rachel is a hero because she can save people—save them from a certain death, from war and famine and supervillains, not from wearing long sleeves. Acquiescing in their requests would, besides get her in a lot—suspension, at least, maybe a hearing with the board—of trouble, demean her, lower her power to the same status as anybody's ability to fold pants.

She makes a couple of exceptions, though: first, after a really productive afternoon working on (Mad) Science stuff in Tina's attic, Rachel dissolves a thunderstorm so Artie's devices won't electrocute him on his way to the bus stop. A few days later, she makes it temporarily sunny so Quinn won't slip on her heels on the way to her daddy's limo after her shift at Barbra's, which, fine, that's not the height of rectitude, exactly, but there's something about getting a genuine smile out of Quinn that's worth bending her morals a little—if Countess Crusade looked, behind her mask, even a little bit like Quinn Fabray, it's no wonder so many of her followers took fall after fall for her.

Which is one more reason for Rachel to lower her standards; inwardly, she keeps comparing Quinn to her mother—to the supervillain side of her mother, anyway—and it's a really hard juxtaposition not to make, considering how infamous Countess Crusade was, and still is, but it's also the one comparison Quinn keeps fighting to demolish, so Rachel feels guilty every time she does it, hence the unnecessary (and, actually, unasked for) weather-bending favors.

The third time she makes an exception, it's not so much a need someone has as a mood she wants to brighten.

Finn's mood, to be precise.

"I just have no idea what's going on with her," he rants at the Berries' breakfast table one Saturday morning, munching on an apple granola bar.

"She's your first girlfriend," Rachel's dad Steve offers as he refills Finn's glass with strawberry smoothie. "It would be exceptional, by which I mean vaguely terrifying, if you understood every little thing she did."

"Besides," John adds, sitting down and covering his face with today's paper, "Santana Lopez is a wealthy lawyer's daughter. Children of wealthy lawyers are naturally sneaky."

"Seriously?"

"Absolutely," John says, and lowers the corner of the paper to wink at Rachel. "There have been studies on the subject."

Finn seems to consider it, then sighs and says around a mouthful of oatmeal, "I think she's trying to make me break up with her."

John shakes his head and goes back to the paper, leaving Rachel to pick up the pieces.

"Hold on," she says, "explain."

"Santana," Finn says, like something is obvious. "She canceled on bowling night a few days ago. Called and said she had something to do, couldn't make it, but didn't say what it was that she had to do. I thought, hey, maybe she was sick and didn't want to tell me, or had run out of make-up or something. Whatever."

Rachel raises an eyebrow. "That's very understanding of you," she says sarcastically.

"I know, right?" Finn asks genuinely. "And then on Thursday, she made me sit next to Quinn at lunch. And Quinn is nice and everything, and I know you're friends with her so she's probably not all bad, but we have nothing in common. And I tried to talk to Santana, but she didn't hear me. Or pretended not to hear me."

Rachel hates herself for thinking it, but if Finn noticed Santana was actively avoiding him, Santana must have been horribly obvious about it, so he's probably right about his upcoming break-up. But what does this mean for Rachel? If she has to pick a team, she's on Finn's, hands down, no questions asked, but she really liked being friends with the popular kids. People looked at her in the hallways like she mattered, and Santana has been really helpful with Mr. Ryerson's technological experiments, and, well, it's not like she really socializes with Quinn at school. But maybe she's not supposed to talk to anybody on Santana's team, and that's where Quinn would be.

And—why is she thinking about teams, anyway? It's Finn; he's been best friends with Rachel through thick and thin, and being friends with the popular kids—well, it was fun while it lasted. And she's still one of the heroes with the most potential in the school, so there's no reason why things should go back to the way they were when Rachel had no powers.

"And," Finn is still saying, "and yesterday, we were supposed to go to dinner and a movie, and she never showed up. She texted me at, like, four in the morning to say she was sorry." He grabs his cell from the table and holds it up for Rachel to see. It says: 'sorry I couldnt make it. xoxo S'. She suppresses the urge to raise her eyebrows at 'xoxo' and presses her lips together.

"No offense, Finn," she says, careful, "you're starting to sound like me." Her dad John subtly chuckles, and Finn's eyes widen. "But, as I'm sure you know, you're not even remotely like me."

"I'm aware," Finn says, grinning winningly.

"Hold your horses," Rachel says, a little sarcastic, but meaning well. "You don't pick up on subtle things. Ever. Believe me, I know. So if you think she's trying to break up with—"

"Trying to make me break up with her," Finn explains.

"Either way," Rachel says. "If you've picked up on either one, it's because she's meant for you to." Finn blinks, and Rachel coughs and adds, shrugging apologetically, "Sorry."

Finn bites a huge chunk off his granola bar and says, "Fine. That doesn't mean I have to do it, right? I like her. I liked her more before this whole stunt, but still. If she wants us to split up, she's going to have to man up and do it herself."

Rachel rolls her eyes. "Or, in other words, you're too chicken to take the plunge in case you're wrong."

Finn shrugs. "I like having a girlfriend," he says tonelessly. He likes having a girlfriend. Well, if that was his only requirement, Rachel could have used knowing that a few months ago.

It's not like she can blame him, anyway. He's a fifteen-year-old boy, and the weather isn't helping, and Rachel feels bad for him. Santana is sweet when she wants to be, but she's a big undertaking, maybe almost as high maintenance as Rachel herself, and Finn wasn't ready for something like that, which Rachel can't blame him for.

So she clears up the sky and makes sure the rest of the day stays warm and bright.

It only occurs to her two days later that if Finn breaks up with Santana, Rachel will have a second chance to tell him about her crush on him. It feels like—like anything else, like he's just her best friend, like something that she doesn't need to have, doesn't need to think about.

Like she's over him, or never was in love with him to begin with.

*
The day Finn decides he's had enough indirect hints and breaks up with Santana, Santana happens to overhear Kurt talking about having movie night at Rachel's house on Friday, and Rachel doesn't have the heart to tell her she can't come. Sure, if it came down to it, Rachel would stick by Finn, but it hasn't come down to that yet, maybe it doesn't have to come down to that ever, and Santana welcomed Rachel and Tina and Mercedes into her house to hang out with her friends, so Rachel would be a big hypocrite if she went all 'sidekicks only' on Santana.

Besides, if Finn starts avoiding the popular kids' table from now on, Rachel is going to be spending a lot of time with the sidekicks. She likes them all, she really does, they're her friends, but Quinn is also her friend, and Quinn won't be caught dead lunching with her best friend's ex, let alone with Kurt and Artie and Mercedes.

"Are you sure," Kurt begins warily, sarcastic, "you want to hang out with us lowlifes?"

Santana pretends to be genuinely concerned about that fact, then cracks a smile. "Yes."

Kurt blinks and turns to Rachel. "Okay, we can keep her."

"Great," Santana says perkily. Then, to Rachel, "I know it looks like the only option, but we don't have to stop being friends just because Finn and me didn't work out." She turns to leave, but, before she steps away, she adds, "By the way, I'm bringing Quinn and Brittany, if that's all right," but doesn't give Rachel enough to confirm it is.

Once Santana's gone, there's a moment of silence over the table. Tina is kind of fidgety, Artie looks slightly proud, Kurt is busy looking at his hair in a small mirror, and Mercedes looks like she just got punched in the brain.

"In my defense," Rachel attempts preemptively, "she welcomed us girls into her house first."

Mercedes nods slowly, determinedly. "And that is the one and only reason I'm not going to say a word about this."

*
An hour into The Day After Tomorrow, Kurt retires to the kitchen to make some tea for himself and Mercedes. When he comes back to the living room, his eyes settle on the window and boggle like he just saw a ghost.

It's his just standing there that makes Artie pause the movie and raise his eyebrows, and everyone else look at Kurt.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but—" He gestures around the living room with his hands, pouting a little. "—I think we're snowed in."

Heads turn in the direction of Kurt's gaze, and, unless Rachel's dads changed their blinds between now and this morning, there's no way all that white belongs to anything other than several sudden feet of snow.

"We what?" says Santana, sounding even less thrilled about this than Rachel feels. Apparently a few hours watching movies with a handful of sidekicks is okay, but being stranded with them in a perfectly good house with perfectly good food and entertainment is just not acceptable. And—okay, Rachel gets that. They still don't trust each other, and being snowed in sounds a lot like a cliché trap, except no one's sprouted out a villain costume and cackled evilly yet. Rachel counts this as a win.

"How did that happen?" Quinn murmurs from her place on the carpet, inches away from Rachel's legs. Her voice is so low it almost seems like it was meant for only Rachel to hear, which is ridiculous, obviously, because Quinn just questioned the likeliness of a snowstorm happening this fast, this randomly, and going unnoticed for over an hour by eight people. Which is a perfectly valid concern, and something Rachel is wondering about herself. She hasn't really thought about what it means to have the ability to control the weather, but it must involve some sort of connection to it, which would make Rachel hyperaware of things like wind and sunniness and random snowstorms.

"Did you d-do this?" Tina asks, definitely only for Rachel to hear—with good reason—and Rachel shakes her head.

They stay in silence for a little while. Rachel wonders how long it would take her to melt the snow without causing any freak accidents as a side effect. It's not really something she wants to do, honestly. Sure, she can save the day, as it were, but sudden or not, it's not the apocalypse. It's just a snowstorm, and most of it will be gone by—tomorrow. And if worse comes to worse, Rapids can fly all of her guests out of the house. He's out having dinner with Rachel's other dad, "giving the kids some leeway", but she can give them a call anytime. It can be an emergency call, even. They haven't had one in over two weeks; it could be fun.

She's about to suggest that when Brittany chimes in happily, "Ooh, we should have a slumber party." How this girl got elected student body president in her sophomore year—or, well, at all—will never cease to amaze Rachel.

"That's—not the worst idea you've ever had," Quinn says cautiously, partly out of surprise and partly like she doesn't want to make Rachel feel any sort of obligation to say yes.

"No, that's—sure, yeah, you guys can stay. It will be fun," Rachel says, and Quinn leans her head on Rachel's knee.

"Cool," says Quinn. "Now, let's watch the movie. We can pretend we never noticed the snow until the closing credits started rolling."

*
"I'm going to assume ordering pizza is out of the question," Artie says once the movie's over and the lights are back on. "Actually, I'm going to assume any sort of takeout is not an option here."

"I can cook," Tina says. "I don't know if you have enough of anything to make the same thing for eight people, but I can—cook. Or figure out how to f-feed us all off the contents of your fridge."

"I can supervise," Artie says. "Make sure nothing explodes."

"Ha, ha," Tina says, rolling her eyes.

Rachel considers saying no, because the kitchen is her dad John's domain, and he's probably getting back in a couple of hours. Except there's a snowstorm, so chances are he'll be stuck for longer rescuing people, and Tina doesn't really look like the kind of person who might burn the house down by accident.

"Sure," Rachel says, "the kitchen is all yours."

So they walk off, and Santana follows them, carrying her enormous purse and muttering something about liquor cabinets and key duplication to Artie, who looks entirely too pleased by the idea of helping someone like Santana do whatever Santana's trying to do. Rachel's first guess is get drunk, which, well, she did just have a break-up, even if it was her idea. Rachel can cut her some slack.

"So we're having that slumber party after all?" Brittany asks, excited.

"Yeah," Rachel says. "But if anyone wants me to call my dad—he's probably out there saving people who do need a flying man to pull them out of disaster scenes, but I'm sure he can take a break to give you guys a lift home." The thing is, she doesn't even mean it sarcastically, but it's hard to say something like that and make it sound genuine.

"I'm good," Brittany mutters, looking down.

"Actually," Mercedes says, "if we're all going to be stuck here overnight, I have to ask," and she turns to Quinn, "were you really trying to kill Rachel last month? Because I don't think I can risk it if you did."

Quinn chuckles and looks up. "Uh, this may come as a surprise to you, but evil is usually born and bred, not just born," and it's amazing how Quinn can make self-defense sound offensive.

"Okay," Rachel interrupts in an attempt to derail any possible fight, and holds her hand out for Quinn. "Why don't you come upstairs with me and help me set things up?"

Quinn raises her eyebrows suspiciously, but complies, and they're halfway up the stairs when Rachel hears the intro notes to a James Bond movie coming from the living room, and a noise she guesses means Kurt's already started gushing over Daniel Craig.

"So, there's my bedroom, which has one bed, one couch," Rachel begins listing. "There's maybe three or four sleeping bags from this one time my dads and I tried to go camping and failed, which could be anywhere, but I'm sure we can find them. There's the couches in the living room. The carpet's comfy, too." Quinn chuckles, and Rachel smiles. "Artie can probably make a bed out of all the chairs in the basement."

"Isn't that off limits?"

"That's a different basement."

"Oh," says Quinn. "You realize you're making the general concept of a handful of people sleeping over at your house sound like a survival guide, right?"

"I'll make you sleep on the floor," Rachel threatens.

"I'd like to see you try," Quinn replies, grinning.

"Don't you have to call your dad or something? Tell him you're not buried under a ton of snow somewhere?"

Quinn makes a humming sound. "It can probably wait until after I've seen and appropriately made fun of your room," she says, and a heavy feeling settles in Rachel's gut, something like anticipation that has no business being there—not when the first thing Quinn does upon walking into Rachel's room is say, "Oh, pink," in a mocking voice, and then zero in on Rachel's to-do list on the wall.

She reads, "Have lunch with Santana et cetera— Okay, one: who spells out et cetera?" Rachel feels a bit of a rush at hearing the phrase pronounced the Latin way. Twice. She shrugs. "And two, what are you, OCD?"

"That is a serious mental disorder, not an insult," Rachel says. "And I've never been formally diagnosed." Quinn chuckles cleanly at that, and it's such an unusual sound, so foreign to Rachel's ears that she's a little shocked by it. Pleased that Quinn laughed at something Rachel said. She meant it in all seriousness, but she feels no need to clarify.

It's a refreshing feeling.

They've found the sleeping bags and laid them out on the floor of Rachel's room so that nobody trips over anybody else by accident when Mercedes checks in on them.

Rachel's still rearranging a handful of objects for maximum security and minimum embarrassment, and, when she looks back at the door, she realizes Quinn's gone from sitting on Rachel's bed and picking at her nails to lying back against the headboard and reading an old Rolling Stone issue Tina forgot in Rachel's library last week.

"What," Mercedes says, "skinny white girl gets to take the bed?"

Rachel laughs. "Well, Mercedes, she's just not used to roughing it."

"Says you, Failure to Camp," Quinn retorts, lowering her magazine.

"Okay," Mercedes enunciates, frowning. "Tina's done doing whatever it was she was doing, so you should probably get down there and give out new instructions before Santana gets her clutches on your good china or whatever." She throws Quinn another glance before leaving, and Quinn grins.

"Thanks, Mercedes," Rachel says to her back, and then, to Quinn, "What was that about?"

"What was what about?" Quinn asks innocently.

"What— Never mind," she says, and mirrors Quinn's fake smile. "So, do you have a type?"

Quinn gives her a half flabbergasted, half offended look, which pleases Rachel immensely. She barely has the strength to refrain from telling Quinn that she's just trying to be nice, asking because, well, obviously Quinn can't talk about this with that many people. The only reason she manages to hold it back is it would be a lie.

"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," Rachel says instead, switching into kind of genuine and walking over to the bed, sitting near Quinn's knees. "I just thought you might want someone to ask."

Quinn still glowers at her for one more second, but then figures two can play at the make-each-other-uncomfortable game and says, "No, I don't have a type, except, you know, I usually like brunettes. But it's not a type." The thing is, she sounds like she's making it up, but at the same time there's a hint of honesty there, something Rachel might have been holding her breath for. "A pattern, maybe. Haven't had that many crushes, you know?"

"So," Rachel says with a smirk, "Santana—"

"No. God, no." Quinn laughs, successfully changing the tone of the conversation to a less ambiguous one. Her laugh is followed by a grimace, not like she's embarrassed because it's true, but like just the thought of it makes her stomach churn in discomfort. "She's like family." It's stupid, it is so stupid, but it takes Quinn adding, "Don't worry, I'm not going to jump you," for Rachel to realize her ass has lifted off the mattress in one of her ridiculous relief-induced levitation episodes, and Quinn thinks that was Rachel's way of making a run for it.

"You don't really have the best track record in that regard," Rachel points out. She hopes the lack of seriousness carries over.

Quinn nods, a little sad. "I don't know what got into me."

Rachel sighs. "I don't know what got into you either," she says. "But if you figure it out, tell me, because I've been wondering," and then she leaves, trying to erase the hopeful look on Quinn's face off her mind. It can't—it's just absurd, and confusing, and just plain unsound. If Rachel happened to be, by some weird stroke of probability, into girls, she wouldn't just be realizing it now. She thinks about herself a lot. She should have known by now. And—what if it's just the novelty, the fact that Quinn trusted Rachel enough to come out to her, trusted her with the kind of information Finn's never been able to confide in Rachel for the mere reason that he has no secrets to hide? Then that would be irresponsible, leading Quinn on like that. Quinn may have a mean streak, but she doesn't deserve to have her heart broken. No one deserves that.

She's kicked out of her reverie by a noise under the staircase as she walks down, inside the library. It sets off a bunch of alarms in Rachel's head, but when she opens the doors it's just Santana there, sitting on an armchair near the window, skimming through the pages of a pastry recipe book.

Santana looks up and frowns for an instant, like she was expecting somebody else, and then says, "Just doing my part for the party. Don't really have a lot of useful skills." Her purse is by her feet, looking sad and lonely, so Rachel smiles warmly at her and heads to the kitchen, leaving the library doors open.

So they have dinner, and then Rock Ant and Rapids get home, in costume, and tell them about how it was Principal Figgins's villain brother who conjured up the snowstorm and he's been taken care of, and Brittany says, "So no slumber party?" and Rachel's dad Steve tells her that they can all stay if they want, no problem, and then Kurt confesses that he was kind of hoping he wouldn't have to forgo his exfoliating ritual because of a freak snowstorm, and they watch another movie, a less catastrophic one, and go home escorted by Rock Ant and Rapids, who are really the best dads in the world.

"So where's the last one?" Rachel's dad John says after dropping Brittany off, and Rachel says, "Drooling on my lap," and it's just—it would be cruel to wake Quinn up, so her dad Steve carries her upstairs, and there's something so vulnerable and strange about Quinn looking this peaceful, this happy in her sleep, Rachel can't help it. She just can't.

So she tucks her in, and she leans forward, watches Quinn's eyelids slide open, her teeth nibble her lower lip, and, before either one of them knows it, they're kissing.

And it's not an accident this time. Quinn's eyes widen in surprise, but she doesn't pull back, just props herself up on an elbow and grips Rachel's shoulder, lazily licks her lips and parts them, mouth open for Rachel to explore, and Rachel climbs on the bed next to Quinn and doesn't stop kissing her, keeps a hand on Quinn's waist and tangles her free fingers with Quinn's left hand, the one that ended up tucked under the pillow when they lay on their sides, facing each other.

They fall asleep like that, legs tangled around each other's and the covers, Quinn's breath warm on Rachel's jaw, her hand a steady presence on her stomach.

It's the last moment of real peace before it all goes to hell.

*
Rachel really thinks movie night went great for everyone involved, except Quinn is nowhere to be seen until lunch time, when she walks all the way to the corner opposite the entrance doors of the cafeteria and slides down defeatedly into a red chair, back to the rest of the world, completely alone.

They haven't actually said a word to each other since breakfast after Quinn slept over, and it's not like Rachel regrets kissing her, and she doesn't think Quinn would have kissed back after pretending she never wanted to kiss Rachel at all if she hadn't thought Rachel was being honest, so they're just floating in limbo now, nothing to grant some sort of self-imposed ostracism on Quinn's part.

"What's going on?" she asks Mercedes, who tends to keep abreast of these things.

"Where have you been all morning?" Mercedes says. "First-period gym, Santana accused Quinn of hooking up with Finn behind her back and then pushed Quinn into a fake pool."

Kurt nods as he links his arm with Mercedes's, falling into step with them both. "Frankly," he says, "it doesn't make any sense to me—the accusation, of course; the story's perfectly plausible considering the people involved. The accusation, however, has my head boggling. Finn and Quinn are way out of each other's leagues."

"No," Rachel says, shaking her head so determinedly she's not sure she's making sense, and if she's wrong she is going to have to kill herself. "No, that's not true. It can't be. Believe me," and she half runs towards Quinn's table, sliding into the seat across from her.

"What are you doing here?" Quinn says. "I thought you were in love with Finn, too. Now you have a reason to stop trying to be my friend. Might as well take it."

Rachel shakes her head. "Now, that is just ludicrous. I'm your friend," she says, and corrects herself with a whisper, "I'm more than that."

Quinn's lips set into a tight grimace. "You're not actually my girlfriend," she mutters, low.

"But you want me to be," Rachel mutters back, "I know you want me to be, and I'm not completely sure what I'm getting into here, which should tell you something about the gravity of this offer, but I want to be." This is the worst possible time for a girlfriend talk Rachel can think of—maybe even the worst possible time Rachel can't think of, too. There are so many things she'd like to do here—fondly accuse Quinn of lying to both Rachel and herself out of cowardice instead of acting on her feelings is at the top of the list—and instead she's stuck talking about a nonsensical rumor the entire school seems to have fallen for.

"Are you insane?" Quinn is saying. "Don't you think I get enough crap for being Countess Crusade's daughter as it is?"

"Do you have the slightest idea how many times you've said that to me?" Rachel hasn't kept count, but she wishes she had; it's been a lot of times. "You've got to get over it. Just—who cares? Who cares about what everyone thinks if you're not happy with yourself?"

"I totally agree," says a voice to Rachel's right, and then a tray's hitting the table and Finn's sitting there, grinning happily. "Besides, Santana wanted me to break up with her. There's no way she cares about something like this, and you shouldn't either."

"You don't even know me," Quinn says.

"I know Rachel," Finn says, smiling. "She can be a handful, but she's usually right."

"I'm told it's one of my best and most annoying traits," Rachel agrees, disregarding the 'handful' remark.

"And you'd think her egotism would be hard to beat," Kurt joins in, taking the seat to Quinn's left.

"What are you doing here?" Quinn snarls. Kurt shrugs and bites into a carrot. Finn grows a bright palm tree out of nothingness next to the table, and points to the coconuts.

"You can throw them at Santana's head if you like," he says. "They break easy and won't cause any permanent damage, but it will make you feel better, I swear."

Quinn chuckles and sniffs, and Rachel realizes how red her eyes are. This is so stupid. When she pictured her Monday, she didn't picture it like this. It was going to be all... mostly subtle, holding Quinn's hand in class and under the table at lunch to make sure Quinn didn't get any weird ideas about the two of them not being on the same page, and then she was going to run the possibility of attending the winter formal as a couple by Quinn, and also kick ass at her Trigonometry test.

"Sweet, coconuts," Mercedes says, sitting down next to Rachel. "Can I have some celery?" she asks Finn.

"Coming up," Finn says, and grows a plant.

"God, I'd missed your produce."

Tina rolls Artie on next, and she doesn't say anything, just sits down and looks around, trying to make sense of things. Mercedes makes eye contact with her, and something must be communicated between them, because Tina instantly smiles and glances shyly at Finn.

...oh. Oh. That's—interesting. And not the point of the conversation.

That's what Rachel's thinking when Puck of all people plops himself down on a chair near Kurt and says, "Whatever, Santana's always been a bitch," and proceeds to ignore everyone until Mike Chang joins them, too, and Puck acknowledges his presence with a grunt.

Mercedes smiles at Mike, says, "Hi," in a sickeningly sweet voice, and no one blinks an eye at it.

Everything feels strangely right, actually—the mix of sidekicks and heroes, freshmen and sophomores, so many people standing up for Quinn Fabray, daughter of a supervillain, and then Mike says, "I think you guys should just come out. It would be an awesome punch line," and Rachel swears she hears a mirror break.

Quinn gapes at him. "Mike, that was a—that's not—what are you talking about?"

"Come on, seriously," Mike says, words full of no-nonsenseness. "I know it's not cool to out people, but look at Hummel here, he's a sidekick and gay and he's still alive." Kurt looks beyond offended, but Mike ignores him. "And Rachel's dads—okay, when I saw you two kiss—"

"When you what?" Rachel asks, but Mike doesn't look away from Quinn.

"After you had that—fluky win against me and Puck at Save the Citizen, I thought—well, first I thought it was hot, then I thought it wasn't, because you're kind of like my pain-in-the-ass sister, and then I thought, wow, there's no way Rachel Berry is a lesbian, she has two gay dads, what are the odds? But if you look at it from a different angle: Rachel's gay dads? They set a precedent. I, of course, can't judge you because, again, pain-in-the-ass sister, but no one else is going to, either. Because Rock Ant and Rapids came out first, and no one cares anymore."

Rachel's head is spinning, because—for one thing, she had no idea Quinn and Mike were such close friends, and, for another, she did not expect that kind of speech from Mike Chang of all people. From Mike Chang and his repulsive elastic limbs.

Quinn purses her lips. "We're not—I mean, what if it doesn't work out?" She's talking to Rachel, now. Just Rachel. Not lowering her voice or anything, but Rachel knows there's nobody else who can answer that question—honestly, Rachel doesn't think she can answer that question, and she wishes she could try in private, instead.

"Then we won't be able to blame a certain type of cupboard for it," Rachel offers.

"Okay," Quinn says, nodding, the beginning of a smile forming on her lips, "okay, yeah, we can—yeah."

*
It's kind of amazing how supportive everyone is of the whole situation, and then again not so much, because—well, Rock Ant and Rapids paved the way for them, even if Rachel has decided not to tell them yet on grounds of this being her first girlfriend—first anything—and all. She will eventually, of course, and they'll probably find out before she does, but they're her dads and, honestly, she loves them, but it's kind of weird.

She does tell them about Santana's stunt, and she's not done ranting when her dad Steve smiles guiltily and says, "I suppose this isn't the best moment to tell you we're going to Santana's parents' Christmas party, is it?"

It's not, but this has nothing to do with Santana's parents, not directly anyway, so she tells them it's fine and picks up where she left off.

Quinn and her don't actually walk up to Santana until three days later, when Quinn holds Rachel's hand proudly across the cafeteria and says, "I don't want your boyfriend. I don't want your ex-boyfriend, and I don't want anybody's boyfriend, either," and doesn't wait for an answer.

Rachel thinks that went well.

*
Three hours later, Rachel sees chaos in the form of her house.

She might be overreacting, because she just got kissed goodbye on her doorstep and watched Quinn's head turn and eyes dart back at Rachel a million times as she walked down the street, like she couldn't bear to part with that image, so she's feeling pretty happy, and the inside of her house is the complete opposite of that. It's a miniature war zone. It is, frankly, the most terrifying thing Rachel's seen since the last time she got slushie'd.

There are chairs in the hallway, a table precariously balanced on the middle of the stairs, and piles of books everywhere. In the living room, there's a couch halfway up the window sill, the magazine rack is empty, and the TV is standing over in a corner, like it's been grounded for life. Her dad John is a few feet up in the air, checking the air vents.

"What is—" going on, she's about to ask, except there's a loud noise from the other side of the hallway, and she figures her dads wouldn't have heard it anyway.

In the kitchen, the wooden table where Rachel's had breakfast since she was three is cracked in the middle like a giant accidentally stomped on it hard, there are two leg chairs keeping the backdoor open, and her dad Steve is looking under the sink, cleaning products scattered everywhere.

She's wondering how to ask and actually get an answer when her dad turns around and notices her there. The panicked look on his face is enough to send Rachel's heart racing.

"The Lifter is gone," he says, eyes wide. "The Lifter is gone."

"Oh my God," Rachel gasps. "That's bad, right?"

"That's really, really, really bad," he confirms.

"Are you absolutely sure it didn't just fall from its stand?" her dad John says, walking over to the kitchen. His expression is steady, calm in a way that isn't so much relaxed as perplexed, flummoxed to the point he can't pretend otherwise. "Rachel," he greets her. "We don't know if it's actually gone yet."

"If it's go—of course it's gone," her dad Steve yells, sounding like those main characters in movies who have found out about something really important and nobody believes them. Rachel's surprised to see this kind of behavior from him with regards to something that could potentially mean major damage.

John looks completely flummoxed even as he tries to pretend otherwise, nodding lightly, "Okay, don't freak out. It may be somewhere—around here. Rachel?"

"I didn't take it, I swear." It's hard to tell where it comes from; obviously she doesn't have it. It's not like she can use the Lifter to rush the growth of her ability to fly, and she's never gotten any satisfaction out of receiving praise or recognition for things she hasn't rightfully accomplished. As much as she appreciates accolades, they're worthless, meaningless, completely void of real pleasure if she's not proud of herself first.

It may or may not show on her face, but her dads don't push the question either way.

"So," she begins, "if it's not in the house, then who—"

"You haven't let anybody in the sanctum since John included your handprint in the safe list, have you?" her dad asks, and Rachel shakes her head.

"But we haven't really had any visitors lately," John points out. "I hate to say this, because you know," and this goes for Rachel, "I do trust you, and I trust your choices, but, if, if, the Lifter got stolen, it must have been one of your friends."

Steve gets a glint in his eye. Rachel hates when this happens; it's practically impossible to get an idea out of his head, no matter how wrong it is, unless you present him with physical proof or wait for days. And this situation does not allow for that. The Lifter may be deactivated, but it's still a power-stealing machine, one that can be fixed and become the really dangerous weapon Countess Crusade was sentenced to years in solitary for. Especially in the hands of an evil technopath like the one who built it.

"If Countess Crusade has gotten hold of this thing, we're doomed," Steve despairs. "And you," he adds, pointing an accusing finger at Rachel, "you—you—I don't know what to do with you. Was it really necessary? Couldn't you have picked someone else? What was it about Countess Crusade's daughter that made you think it would be a good idea for you to spend time with her? I'm not saying you had to charge her for her mother's crimes, but really, you could have ignored her instead of offer your ass on a platter. Our ass on a platter."

John whistles and raises his hands in a calming motion, like that's going to make Rachel stop gaping at her other dad. "Let's not get ahead of ours—"

"You're just like them, aren't you?" Rachel interrupts, voice squeaky with frustration. "She's not Countess Crusade's daughter, dad. It doesn't matter whose daughter she is. She's a person. She's Quinn Fabray. And anyway, I'm Whirl Girl's daughter and no one has ever offered to put me in a padded room just in case, have they? But Quinn's had people outside her house waving signs about imprisoning the evil egg of Countess freaking Crusade. And Quinn? She may be the daughter of a supervillain, but she's not evil. She's sweet and smart and funny and she's been a great friend to me and I resent your accusation."

Steve goggles at her, and John fails at stifling a snort. Her dads, so dignified.

"So," Steve says, words laced with sarcasm, "if your friend Quinn is on Schindler's, who would you suggest we put on our suspect list?"

"You can't just ask me to point my finger at my friends. In case you haven't noticed, this is the first time I've had any real ones besides Finn. I don't want to throw that away just because you misplaced one of the gadgets you're set on collecting and storing yourself."

Okay, this is bad. She just blamed a robbery on her dad. Accused him of keeping a memento aisle in a high-security sanctum like that's a bad thing. She immediately feels terrible, because it's not his fault, but she can't stop thinking about the possibility of Quinn being the culprit, can't take a break from worry to scan the rest of her friends—and who is she kidding? They're sidekicks, they could use a power or two, but they're good people, and anyway, how—

"Wait," she says, "if they got the Lifter from the sanctum, they must have gotten in there somehow. Isn't there a record—"

"Your handprint," says John carefully. "There's an instance of it that you haven't told me about, from the night of the snowstorm."

"I didn't go in that day." Everything feels so quiet now. "Is there a time stamp?" John hands her a slip of glossy white paper, small as a receipt. "I think I was—in the living room, turning off the DVD player."

"Was your friend Quinn there?"

Rachel can't say she was. She remembers the numbers on the little LCD screen, and she wishes she'd taken Quinn downstairs with her. She wishes she'd known this would happen and given Quinn the chance of an alibi. Rachel just left her in her room by herself.

"Well, then," her dad Steve says in a compassionate tone, "that doesn't really help her case."

"But it was just me and Mercedes and Kurt," she says. "It could have been anybody else. It could have been someone who we didn't even know was there. An intruder. Rock Ant and Rapids have countless enemies."

John looks down at her, eyes wide and sad. "Rachel, we need to find that Lifter. We can't just wait for some random burglar to bring it back or pop on security camera records taken during a snowstorm before we start looking."

"Right," Rachel says. "Safety first, huh?"

John shakes his head. "I'm sorry. The only thing we can do is keep it off the record for now. Talk to them ourselves instead of take the case to court. But if the Lifter doesn't turn up soon, that's a job the police need to be on."

Rachel nods shakily. It's true. If it were anybody else who'd misplaced a destructive weapon, Rachel would want professionals on the case. Rachel would want the press to be on top of it. Rachel would want to be aware that there was a destructive weapon back in circulation, so she could take preventive measures.

"I need to take a walk," she says, and heads for the front door.

*
Rachel's timing is obviously flawless, because she stumbles right into Quinn on Quinn's way out her own front door, and Quinn looks up, mouth shaped into a cute little 'o', and smiles in that way that makes Rachel's insides melt.

Except this time the feeling is closely accompanied by a figurative stab in the stomach.

It's not like she had to come here. She would be better off at home, discussing what might have happened with her dads, digging into the emergency ice cream stash and maybe finding some loophole with regards to her girlfriend's possible involvement in a plot to steal an illegal gadget before Quinn was even aware something has happened.

Instead, Rachel inhales deeply and says in one breath, "Did you steal the Lifter?", one foot ready to step back, guarded.

"The—the Lifter?" Quinn asks, like she doesn't even know what it is. "The thing my mother went to jail for?"

"Well, admittedly she went to jail for more than just that, but what other Lifter would it be, Quinn?" Rachel says, shaking her head. She doesn't want to believe this. She doesn't want to believe Quinn used her, but it makes so much sense. "Do you have it or not?"

"No. No, I don't have it." She's frowning, the kind of expression that suggests she's just figuring out what Rachel is accusing her of and finds it appalling, unbelievable. The thing is, some people are born with the ability to lie with every little gesture. "I don't want that thing. I don't want to see it, I don't want to touch it, and I sure as hell don't want to own it. My mother went to jail for it, Rachel, are you kidding me?"

Rachel tsks. "You know, you say 'my mother went to jail for it' like it means you don't want to go to jail for it too, but to me it sounds like your mother went to jail for it, and you don't think she deserved it, or deserved to have her monstrous creation taken away from her, so you retrieved it for her right under my nose, out of my freaking house." She presses her teeth together, hard. "That's what everything was about, wasn't it? I should have known you wouldn't be interested in someone like me. You were just trying to seduce me so you could steal your mom's little criminal toy. And oh, oh, this is what that whole thing on Monday was about, wasn't it? Santana found out about your little plan?"

Quinn stares. And stares, and stares some more, and her chin wobbles for a moment like she's going to cry before she pulls herself together. It makes Rachel feel like she's being too hard on Quinn, but what would be the point of questioning her if she's not? They haven't known each other that long; Rachel doesn't think Quinn has a right to expect trust from Rachel just yet.

"Are you going to say something or just act at me until I go away?"

And then there's a thin finger pointing at Rachel, and Quinn is shaking her head in a short vibration, saying, "Right now—right now, Rachel, I'm so angry with you, you have no idea how hard it is not to freeze your head off, but I'd still tell you if what you were saying was true. Even if I'd done something that stupid, I would tell you. I would trust you to do the right thing with that information. But I can't tell you that, because I don't have that thing. I don't want that thing. I didn't even know you had it! And if I had, I wouldn't have known where it was—"

"I told you," Rachel chimes in. "I told you, Quinn. I told you about my mom's uniform, and I told you about the sanctum and the Lifter belonged to your mother and you're telling she doesn't want it back?"

"—or how to get it, and of course she wants it back, are you crazy? It's her Lifter. She could have it, but I have no way of knowing that. I haven't seen her in years. She was on parole for like, two weeks in June and she never bothered to come see me."

Rachel bites her lip and breathes out. "How do I know you're not lying to me right now? All part of your little plan?"

"There's no little plan. There's no plan." She's muttering, sounding desperate, and Rachel wants so badly to believe her, but can't bring herself to say the words. What if she's wrong? What if accepting what Quinn is telling her will bring everyone down? Maybe Quinn sees into her thought process, or maybe she doesn't, because after a few seconds her face turns the color of resignation and she adds, "You told me the other day I complained a lot about people expecting villainous behavior from me, and I thought, hey, maybe she's right, maybe I'm past worrying about that, but you just proved yourself wrong."

And then she walks back into her house, slamming the door right in Rachel's face.

*
The week that follows is a very strange one.

It's not like Rachel really believes Quinn did it. Rachel only believes it would have been relatively easy for her; she could have done it. However the thief managed to reproduce Rachel's handprint for the machine to let them in, they probably needed a model, and Rachel has nursed a myriad of cups and glasses and plates at Barbra's, not to mention the occasional book she's lent Quinn for a project, or the prints on their shared microscope in lab.

Besides, Quinn is the daughter of the woman who put the Lifter together to begin with. There's a connection there, and it has nothing to do with Quinn's struggle to get people to look at her and see not a shadow of a supervillain, not the blood relation to Countess Crusade, but Quinn, Quinn herself, whoever Quinn happens or chooses to be. Quinn rejects comparisons and connections to her mother rightful and deservedly on a like parent, like child level, but there's no denying Countess Crusade—Carla Fabray, back when she had a human life to lead—is a part of Quinn's family, and it's Countess Crusade's Lifter that got stolen, and Countess Crusade has spent the past decade in solitary. Evil affiliations aside, if she were to concoct a plan to retrieve her little toy, Rachel assumes she'd rely on relatives and people she trusted before her downfall to carry it out for her.

Possibility and likeliness minus motive does not equal guilt, though, and Rachel finds it hard to believe that whatever's going on between them has been a lie all along. Rachel's not great with people, but nothing Quinn's ever done has seemed strategic. Her actions have always been a bit of a chaotic jumble, the resistant, almost haughty composure of Quinn's personality at odds with her willingness to reach out for Rachel. It's much too complex for a sixteen-year-old to fake, or a woman in solitary to plan and guide her daughter through. Not to mention all those steps back Quinn took along the way.

And the week is strange because of that, mostly; because Quinn doesn't flee and Rachel's not sure enough to stop talking to her and not sure enough to apologize for calling her a thief, so they sit together in lab and don't speak, and sit together at lunch and listen to Finn and the others talk about class and midterms and winter break and try not to ask Quinn and Rachel if they're all right.

Finn asks Rachel, though, when he walks her home after class on Wednesday. He says, "I know you think I have the perceptive skills of a blind iguana, but I can tell something's bothering you, and you know you can tell me anything. Everything. We're still—I mean, you're still my best friend." Which is endearing, except she can't bring himself to tell him he's the only reason Quinn and Brittany and Santana were at her house when the Lifter was stolen in the first place. If he hadn't let Santana—

—and that's when it occurs to her that no girl who wears a cheerleader uniform to school solely for the sake of the message it sends would be caught dead in a library, public or private, and this is such a suspicious time to take days off sick, and she must be furrowing her brows because then she hears Finn's voice again, antsy this time.

"I mean, you are, right? I know I neglected you a little, but you're like my strange, scary big sister. I can't imagine life without you making me eat oatmeal for breakfast," he trails off.

Rachel would force a smile, but the one that comes is natural, distracted. "Of course I am, Finn. I'm just worried about something. Something not at all important or dangerous."

"Something like... homework? Or something like Quinn Fabray? Is she being abusive?" His eyes widen. "It's never too early to get out of a harmful relationship," he recites, like he's heard his mom say that exact thing to herself a million times.

Rachel shakes her head as they reach her doorstep. "Nothing is directly causing me harm. Quinn is lovely," and probably has a right to be so awkward around Rachel now. "Everything's fine. Just having an off day."

"Your last off day ended up in a fight to the death with your current girlfriend," he says, tilting his head. "And it's been over three days."

Rachel wants to tell him about the Lifter, she really does, but there's no need to make him feel guilty if her suspicions about Santana are as right as her previous suspicions about Quinn seem to be, so she gives a generic answer and changes the subject.

The great thing about Finn is he doesn't push Rachel, doesn't make her feel like he sees the elephant in the room and they should talk about it. And it's not like Rachel's in denial or anything; she's just working. She knows this job better than most people her age; she knows it's not all perks and giant robots, that, beyond the odd hours and having to maintain a double life, sometimes people you thought were your friends betray you.

It just seems cruel not to let Finn believe it's easier a while longer.

 

The only time she comes close to patching things up with Quinn is after school on Thursday. Quinn is getting some books from her locker and Rachel approaches her carefully, though she hopes it doesn't look as uncomfortable as it feels. Rachel doesn't want Quinn and her to be that couple who constantly breaks up and gets back together, and it's so inconvenient that Rachel's dads realized the Lifter was gone just days after the whole school learned about them. The other kids are well acquainted with Quinn's proclivity for mild violence and the fact that a good number of heroes have her back, so they wouldn't say a word, but Rachel would rather go through this kind of rough patch in private.

"I'm sorry this has to be so awkward," Rachel says. "Just preventive measures, you know?"

Quinn slams her locker shut and scowls. "Why are you still sitting with me at lunch, anyway? I thought we'd agreed I was evil all along."

"You need to stop pushing people away, Quinn," Rachel says, compassionate. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Which means..." Quinn begins, trailing off. "Wait, let me get this straight: you're still hanging out with me so you can keep an eye on any suspicious activity. Well, that's wonderful. Just heartwarming."

"That's not—no, this isn't about that. This is about, well, you should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. It's a law." Quinn glowers, and Rachel adds, "It's a law I willingly abide by."

Quinn blinks. "Wow. Thanks for the vote of confidence."

Rachel thinks Quinn would have suggested splitting up if it wasn't just a rough patch. The possible backlash wouldn't have mattered to her—Rachel's had more than one bad experience with popular kids, and she knows Quinn would have found a way to make Rachel look terrible and herself look good not only in comparison but on every imaginable level. But that's not what Quinn's doing; Quinn is weathering the storm like she actually cares about losing Rachel, and there's something so honest about her reactions that Rachel feels sick to her stomach every time she wonders if maybe Santana's not around because Quinn got rid of her, or whether the daughter of Countess Crusade's official prosecutor would really have an use for the Lifter that required stealing it so many years after the trials.

Whatever way Rachel looks at the puzzle, none of the pieces seem quite willing to fit.

And then, of course, is the fact that her dads have called the police, and most of Rachel's friends have had their houses searched for something she's not sure they know belonged in her basement. There's only so many ways you can commiserate with somebody without blurting out why the police showed up on their doorstep out of the blue, or why it's being kept a secret.

*
The police find nothing in Santana's house, but Rachel hadn't thought it would be that easy.

"I just don't understand what Santana could possibly want the Lifter for," Rachel mutters to Quinn when she refills her cup at Barbra's, a little pointedly. It's not Rachel's fault the situation is the way it is. It would have been irresponsible of her not to have considered all possible variables just because—what? Because she's supposed to be blind with adoration for her girlfriend? And—she is, honestly, a little bit. That's the only reason she defended Quinn when her dads jumped to conclusions. She wants to tell Quinn that, but it seems corny and irrelevant, and it was wrong—it was a lie. She could have been helping a criminal, but she still said all those things because she likes to have Quinn around. She likes to look at her and she likes to kiss her and she likes the warm feeling in her chest when Quinn interlaces their fingers.

She really misses that.

"Don't be stupid, who wouldn't want the Lifter?" Rachel opens her mouth to speak, but Quinn goes on. "You're ambitious. You want to be the best, don't you? You want to be the hero to end all heroes, and you want to be powerful. Sure, you're going to use that strength to do good, but wouldn't it be helpful if you could, I don't know, carry several people at once? You could use Santana's power, multiply a flying version of yourself. Or—if you put a supervillain in jail, wouldn't it be helpful to take their power away instead of locking them in a place where they can't use it? And, well, if that power can be used for good, then why not grab it for yourself?"

Rachel scowls. "Uh, I have morals."

"It's not about morals," Quinn says. "It's about the possibility of doing something you can't currently do. Even if you never encounter anybody who you think deserves to have their power stripped off of them, you know you could manage something like that if you did."

"You're not helping your case," Rachel points out with a sad smile, and Quinn softly snorts.

"No kidding."

They stay silent for a while, Quinn standing with a coffee pot in her hand, Rachel sitting up, forearms resting on the pristine table. Eventually Quinn averts her eyes and moves to leave, but Rachel grasps her elbow and says, "Come here."

"I have to go back to work," Quinn says, though Barbra seems to have everything covered at the moment.

Rachel shakes her head and tugs at Quinn's sleeve until Quinn sits next to her and stops avoiding eye contact. "I don't want to believe it was you."

Quinn gives her a defiant look that somehow manages to seem hurt instead of offended.

"I don't," says Rachel, "but it's not about me. It's not personal. I can't let my feelings for you carry any substantial weight in an objective investigation. It's not me."

"Well, that's great, Rachel," Quinn snaps, sarcastic. "Me, on the other hand? I have no trouble at all letting your objective investigation carry all kinds of substantial weight in the way I see you." She doesn't move to leave, but she stares straight ahead, at the unmoving door, which feels exactly the same—like Quinn's not there anymore.

"I do," Rachel confesses, voice small, because she shouldn't. She should be wary, alert, on the lookout for trouble. She should be putting more distance between them until the Lifter is found, but instead she's looking for Quinn in all the right places, spending time with her that has nothing to do with keeping this rough patch private, or with possibly catching Quinn with her defenses down.

Her admission prompts Quinn to let down her guard, though. She meets Rachel's eyes more openly than before, more willing to make a peaceful moment last.

Rachel reaches out to slip a loose strand of blond hair behind Quinn's ear, and her hand stays on Quinn's face, cupping her jaw, thumb nearing the corner of Quinn's lips.

Quinn smiles into the touch and leans in to kiss Rachel—on the cheek, first, a chaste, dry press of lips against skin, and then she drags her mouth over Rachel's, and it feels like a truce within a truce. It makes Rachel worry that's still what this is—if the original truce will eventually be over, if all of this is a misleadingly wonderful lull in the course of their unfortunate enmity.

She kisses Quinn harder, parts her lips to suck on Quinn's tongue, and she doesn't think it's a stop, but a destination.

Rachel's never had to trust anybody fully but her dads, and Finn to a lesser extent, but she thinks she trusts Quinn. Maybe. Trusts her not to hurt Rachel on purpose, anyway. Trusts she won't give into people's negative expectations of her as long as she knows there's nothing better on the flip side.

They kiss until Barbra coughs overhead and says, voice warm and amused, "No PDA on the job, Miss Fabray," and Quinn apologizes but steals a last quick taste of Rachel's mouth, lips fighting back a smile.

The thing is, trust will never be real evidence for Rachel. She doesn't think there's anything wrong with that; if nothing else, it means she's levelheaded and has a useful ability to compartmentalize.

*
"I still think she has it," Rachel says at dinner.

"I assume 'it' is the Lifter, but who is 'she'?" her dad John asks. He's mainly humoring her, she knows that, but there's still that note in his voice that tells her he's listening.

Her dad Steve raises his brows. "I hope you're talking about Countess Crusade's daughter."

"Her name is Quinn," Rachel says. It was annoying the first time, but it doesn't get any less tiresome with time and repetition. "She's her own person."

"Well, then I hope," her dad corrects himself, "you're talking about Quinn Fabray."

"Thank you," Rachel says, "and no, I'm not talking about Quinn. I'm talking about Santana. I have a bad feeling about her parents' Christmas party," she lies. "Did the police check the place they're holding it at?"

"I highly doubt a hotel with such a numerous staff wouldn't have reported that kind of object by now."

"How would they know they ought to? It's not public knowledge."

"It's a huge metal ray gun, Rachel," her dad points out in a patronizing tone.

"Just hear me out," she says, and begins her list: "She was the only person I know who was in the library that night. She spent a while talking to Artie about key duplication."

"The sanctum's not locked under key, Rachel."

"She hasn't been to school all week," she goes on. "She dated Finn."

"I seem to recall a young lady having a similar fixation on that boy," her dad says, tilting his head meaningfully.

"She asked him to show her his tree, dad," Rachel says, exasperated, "when neither you nor I were home. And no, that is not a thinly veiled euphemism, thanks for not asking."

Her dad stares for a few seconds. "Well," he offers finally, shrugging, "does she have a special interest in flora?"

Rachel just rolls her eyes. "I'm actually serious about this. What if she has something planned for the party? Other than the party? A lot of people with potentially extremely dangerous powers are going to be there. I would like this weekend not to be the last time I saw my parents alive. And anyway, why are you so calm about this? If I recall correctly, I wasn't the one who completely freaked out when she noticed the Lifter was missing."

"But you're the one who's freaking out because we think her girlfriend is a thief."

"That—" Rachel gapes. "That is neither here nor there. And I will have you know my girlfriend—" She tries to give the word a defiant air, but it comes out doubtful instead. Not because her girlfriend is not her girlfriend, but because she was hoping she'd have a chance to—tell her dads about that in a context that allowed for elaboration. "—barely tolerates me recently because I picked common sense and thoroughness over romantic folly."

Her dad John laughs, elated, and Steve looks back, startled. John says, "The following remark is corny and out of place, but—god, we raised you right." Rachel would normally beam with pride, but she mostly feels confused. It's good, though, because she catches the moment her dad's expression goes from amused to appropriately attentive. He asks, tone calm and serious, "Are you sure you're not set on blaming this girl because your love life hangs in the balance?"

"My love life does not—" Rachel begins, except it's a lie, and it's not the point. "Yes, I'm sure."

"Okay," her dad says. "You don't have any actual proof; you're just guessing."

"I'm not guessing," Rachel says. "I'm hypothesizing based on actual proof. Did you know Santana is top of our Science class, and taking a more advanced one at the same time? She could probably reactivate the Lifter in her sleep."

"It's not that easy," her dad says, voice steady like a teacher's. "It's not easy for anyone to reassemble or reproduce a device that was created by a technopath. That's why it's a power. That's why we call technopaths technopaths instead of computer buffs or experienced hackers or people with a knack for mechanics."

"You haven't seen Santana in lab," Rachel huffs.

Her dad shakes his head. "But that's not what I meant," he goes on. "You don't have proof you can go to any authorities with. We don't have any leads. We don't know where to look. We have nothing to hold onto to go for a preemptive strike. But we are going to be there, so I was thinking maybe you could do—surveillance. Just in case something happens, I can wear an earpiece and if you see trouble on the screen, if you see somebody use a power they shouldn't be using or the radar detects an unexpected presence you can just tell us."

Rachel ponders this. It's been a while since she last did surveillance over one of her dads' operations. More often than not it wasn't so much a need for a third pair of eyes as it was a way to ensure Rachel's sanity, and let her worry only about what was really going on rather than what might be happening where she couldn't see. And this isn't really unlike those times—only her dads aren't on an official mission like she wishes they were, and she doesn't think she's welcome in Santana's house, or rented hotel ballroom or whatever, so a map on a screen beats sitting around with her friends or Quinn trying to ignore the awkwardness of the thing she's not telling them and all the accusations she's not ready to take back.

So she says, "Okay. Okay, that's fair. Do you have a guest list?", and spends the following couple of days setting shop in the library and programming the computer system in the sanctum to do what she needs it to do.

*
Finn finds out about what she plans on spending Saturday night doing by dropping by for breakfast Saturday morning, and for company and safety and the fact that Rachel needs to take bathroom breaks and possibly stop looking at the screen while she orders dinner Finn offers to stay over as long as she'll have him, which, when it comes to Finn and Rachel's house, is usually something around eighteen hours.

Finn is not what Rachel would call sharp-eyed, but even he can notice a red light beeping on a huge digital plan of fifteen hotel floors. Besides, it's not the first time he's been here during her dads' missions, or the first he has helped. The thing with being a superhero team, even if that team consists of only two individuals, and having some of the most useful powers around is her dads tend to get assigned to some really complex cases, and cases involving a ridiculous amount of people. They both have good reflexes and a knack for reading their rivals' next intended move, but they can't possibly oversee dozens of henchmen at once. The software John set up, though, can, and she's been doing this for so long that it almost feels like a childhood memory, fun when she doesn't let her paranoia take over her senses, and she's missed it a little since school began.

Quinn doesn't really factor into Rachel's concept of this, though, and Rachel knows Quinn's not going to reach out and make plans with her for tonight unless Rachel calls first, so Rachel doesn't.

So Quinn is not even supposed to know about this and, even though, come to think of it, it would only do good for Quinn to know Rachel's genuinely got her suspicions set on somebody else, it doesn't exactly fill Rachel with joy to see the day turn out differently.

It begins as planned, the tight feeling in Rachel's gut more about the possibility that she might be wrong than about something tangibly bad happening. She and Finn spend eighty-three minutes by the counter watching green dots with black block letters attached to them flicker around the screen alternately like a flock of sheep and like poor lost lambs. There's the occasional determined double-dot walk towards a room or a bathroom or somewhere private, which makes Rachel raise an eyebrow and Finn munch on a too big handful of Cheetos to keep from getting glared down for gossiping.

Eventually, she asks Finn, "Can you keep an eye on the screen for me?" and Finn nods, looking a little confused, and says,

"Where are you going?"

She figures the sliding bookshelves, the security screen and the walls that open for her when she places her hand on the display are answer enough.

The computer system in the sanctum is probably disproportionate to the not-even-a-mission Rachel's trying to keep an eye on—it has eleven screens, a much broader zoom range and live-action video—and it's entirely possible she's never used it before and may not really know how to make the most of it, but it doesn't hurt to check.

Once everything looks right, she sits down and remembers she's basically made Finn promise not to blink until further instructions are issued to him.

"You can come down here if you want, Finn!" she yells from the basement, and after a few seconds she hears the thump of his weight hitting the floor.

"So, wait," Finn says, and Rachel listens as she carefully watches an orange dot make its way towards the elevator, where there are security cameras Rachel can use to determine if they're a welcome presence who either was included in the guest list as a plus one or Rachel didn't have the vitals for, or an intruder.

It turns out to be Puck's mom, and Rachel breathes in relief as she configures the information into the computer and sees the dot turn green as Mrs. Puckerman walks out of the elevator and into the ballroom on the top floor where Santana's parents are having their party.

"If you're here, and the phone's upstairs, how are we going to order dinner?" Finn is saying.

"There's an emergency phone right here," she says, pointing at it. "You'll just have to keep watch a bit longer while I answer the door, that's all."

Finn shuffles uneasily in his chair, which wouldn't really make Rachel's head turn in normal circumstances, except instead of fidgeting until he grows bored, he stops before he even gets around to setting one of his shoes on top of the other.

Rachel follows his gaze towards the middle screen—the one reflecting the arrangement of the ballroom—and nearly chokes on her tongue when she sees an unexpected orange blob.

"What the hell," she says between coughing. "How did that get in there?"

"Beats me." Finn shrugs, leaning back on his chair with his eyes wide like she's waiting for Rachel to do something. Like turn on a live-action camera.

Only there are no live-action cameras covering that particular spot, and Rachel starts writing a letter of complaint to the hotel manager in her head while she makes sure her earpiece is in order. She hasn't used it in a while; it could have gathered dust somewhere important.

"Jay-B?" she calls. The orange dot is not moving, which is somewhat comforting. It could mean the orange dot's got the Lifter and is currently stealing the powers off everybody else from its comfortable place near the loudspeakers by the stage, but nobody else is moving in strange ways either, so Rachel reserves her panic for when she has confirmation that something's wrong. "Jay-B," she repeats, more insistently this time. They've been using the same code names since she was eleven; if her dad's not answering, it's either because he's talking to somebody else or because his earpiece is acting up, not because he doesn't know she's referring to him.

"RiRo?" comes his voice at the other end of the line, finally. The green dot that corresponds to him on the screen moves over to a corner, so he must have been busy, or felt he might get listened in on.

"Jay-B, thank God," she says. They picked those particular names because they make it so easy for people to assume they're gossiping rather than carrying on an important exchange of information—and besides, to an outsider, they're using the wrong names, so there's no point in trying to join their conversation; if they can't even get the names right, there's no way they might have caught wind of any juicy new scoop. High-society mommies are a real classy bunch. "There's some strange activity going on near the stage."

"Strange as in code red strange, or strange as in invisible strange?" her dad asks, green dot shifting, presumably to look around the room.

"Strange as in code orange strange," Rachel says. "Unidentified person. Never saw them come in, computer doesn't recognize them, and none of the security cameras are showing us that spot."

Her dad sighs. "Give me a more specific location," he says, and Rachel tells her about the stage and the speaker and also the exact coordinates, in case that makes a difference to him. He says, "The only person standing over by the speakers is Santana, RiRo. And she's acting completely normal."

"That's not Santana," Rachel proclaims, blood boiling, sitting up and zooming in. Still an orange dot with a question mark hanging over its head. Fantastic.

Her dad chuckles in her ear. "Trust me, I would recognize somebody else. You must have put her variables in wrong."

"I did not," Rachel says firmly. "You've been to dozens of parties Santana's parents have thrown. If her variables were wrong we would have noticed much sooner. Like, I don't know, when she walked in earlier? And was a green dot? And—" She clicks around, checks every last screen. "—she's not there anymore."

"Wait," her dad says, chuckling. "Did you say security cameras? Did you move the operation to the sanctum?"

Rachel crouches in her seat, feeling like she's been caught red-handed. "Maybe?"

"Well, maybe you're not ready to use that computer system all by yourself yet."

"Finn's here," she pouts.

"Hey, Mr. B," Finn calls out, waving even though nobody but Rachel can see him.

"RiRo," her dad says, "that's Santana. I know you want her to be the one who stole the Lifter, but if you're really so convinced that Quinn Fabray didn't do it, I believe you, alright? You don't have to blame somebody else to take that weight off Quinn. I know you two have—a special something going on," he says, and Rachel blushes to her ears, because it's embarrassing to hear things like that from your dad. "And I know it sucks to think somebody you like so much may have been using you, but we have as much on her as we have on Santana—just a vague feeling and the knowledge that they had opportunity and some sort of motive to do it. That's it. And I'll remind you, in case you forgot, Santana's dad has publicly worked against Countess Crusade since we caught her. Quinn and her dad have just refrained from visiting her. And if Henry Lopez wanted to double-check anything we have in storage, he would have asked for a court order years ago."

"Are you sure?" Rachel asks. "Maybe Santana has different liaisons. Maybe that is not actually Santana." He just chuckles, and okay, she's being a little overdramatic, but there's an orange dot on the screen, and Santana's nowhere to be found, and there are superpowers involved, and supersensitive machinery, and her parents are there, and neither one of them can really do anything against a laser built by a technopath if they're not at the very least aware they might have to do something against it. "This isn't funny," she says, "you could be in real danger."

"Sure," her dad says. "Baby, why don't you eat something and rest your eyes and maybe call your girl over and let her do surveillance with you and Finn, show her you mean it?"

Rachel narrows her eyes at no one. She is so not calling Quinn over if there's a chance she might end up endangered, and anyway, she's not ready to talk to her dad about that. She asks, loud and clear, "Do you have a suspect you haven't told me about?"

Her dad laughs. "No, we don't. Yet. But the police have written a few out and they're keeping us posted, and we trust the police, okay? They're the good guys."

"Just because they're good guys doesn't mean they can't be outsmarted by bad guys," Rachel points out. Sometimes she feels like she has to reteach her dads things they taught her themselves.

"That is a fair concern," her dad says, "but not yours—really, not anybody's to have tonight. Just have some fun, kiddo. It's Saturday night," and then the lines goes dead. Or comatose. Paused, whatever.

"So who's the Big Bad Orange Dot?" Finn asks when he knows for sure the conversation's over.

Rachel purses her lips. "Santana, apparently," she says, unconvinced. Finn grins and seems to relax, at least until she stands up and adds, "Finn, get ready. We're crashing a party."

Finn blinks and says, "What?" and then, when the printer starts printing off maps and addresses and everything Rachel thinks they might need on paper, "Can we at least get dinner first? I'm starved."

*
They get pizza, because fighting doesn't really sit well on an empty stomach and anyway, Rachel could use some time to prepare, and the first time she says she's got a plan—all of two minutes after she decides she's taking matters into her own hands—Finn has the gall to look confused and say,

"Wait. Hey, Rachel, wait, wait." She may be walking around in a fit of hyperactivity and that's why he's repeating herself. Or he may be overreacting. No one will ever know. "Weren't you the one who always said half-baked counter-plans only led to half the evil plan being carried out and, um—half the villains fleeing home safely?"

"That's not the point, Finn," Rachel mutters, exasperated.

"Nuh-uh, it totally is," he says. "Besides, how are we going to get there? It's on the other side of town, and your dads took their car, and neither one of us has a driving license anyway."

"I can fly," Rachel blurts out, then amends, "Possibly. I can try."

"Wait, you can—fly?" Finn frowns. "When did this happen? Last I knew, you broke an arm trying to do exactly that."

Rachel shrugs. "Well, it's a new development. Mostly accidental. I've tried not to push it, because we both know how well that worked out last time, but this is an emergency, so—"

Finn raises his hands to stop her. "What do you mean by 'accidental'?"

"Caused by relief," Rachel attempts, face contracting into a pout. This is so not the time for Finn to try to make sense of things.

"Wow, that's really comforting," Finn says, "especially because that's exactly how you're feeling right now, isn't it? Relaxed and relieved. Just ready to float."

"But those times were not on purpose," Rachel explains. She nods along her words for extra self-support and enthusiasm. "I bet if I tried I could totally get past those sneaky emotional restrictions and just use my power at will." Finn is nodding too, except he looks thoroughly unconvinced. "Really. I can fly."

There's a pause, and Rachel really thinks he's about to capitulate. He's Finn.

"Well, I can't, and you need backup," is what he finally says instead, putting his concern before his constant determination to please everybody, and also sounding more firm than Rachel's ever heard him sound in his life.

It's really touching, actually. Unexpected, but sweet.

"That's ridiculous," Rachel says. "And you can use branches or something to tie yourself to me while I attempt and succeed in my pursuit to defy gravity. It's perfectly realistic."

"It's also not even remotely foolproof," Finn says. "I don't trust you to not drop me on my head. You don't trust you to not drop me on my head." Rachel is pretty sure falling from a hundred feet in the air is incredibly dangerous regardless of what body part hits the ground first, but that probably doesn't say much in her favor. "And the pizza's not even here yet and you promised we'd have dinner first, so take your time. Think about it. Don't do anything you wouldn't want the whole school to know you did."

He's just sprouting off reverse pep talk now, Rachel knows.

And it's working.

After all, Rachel is nothing if not thorough, and, as a rule, she's all about sticking to her principles, so that gives them both time to feed themselves. She still thinks they could take the villains down right away, spare everyone the risk involved in waiting for things to happen instead of stopping them before they cause any harm, but then Finn wants one more slice, and then another, and then another, and Rachel ends up wandering around the sanctum with the volume on the computer turned up to a screech and every suspicious movement on the orange dot's part—and the orange dot mingles, though Rachel wouldn't expect anything else from someone so used to playing hostess—programmed to trigger an alarm like a glorified restraining order. Rachel isn't leaving anything to chance.

She's still maybe not looking at the screen as much as she should, because she's almost certain Henry Lopez used to have a superhero alias, and she can't remember what it was, and Santana—or the orange dot, whoever that was—told Rachel weeks ago that he never had any powers, and her dad will just laugh it off if she asks, so instead she's kneeling on the floor, hoping it's really as clean as it looks like and won't leave any dark stains on her creamy white knee-highs, and looking through a box of newspaper clippings from the year her dads became a legend.

"I have to admit," Finn says after she's made her way through several useless post-debacle mini biographical remarks, "I haven't the slightest idea what you're looking for right now." He's loud like the fact that he's not looking at her means she somehow can't hear him as well as if he were, but she's used to that. She's also used to him talking around mouthfuls of pizza, so she's able to understand every word.

"Neither do I," she admits. It's a half-truth—she's looking for something, anything, on Santana's dad, but Santana could have lied about it for a number of reasons, not least of which the pressure it puts on you to have too much skewed-for-the-better genetical material—but Finn's always more willing to take Rachel seriously when she puts something on the line, like, say, her dignity, and it's Finn. He's not going to think less of her.

That's what Rachel's thinking about when she spots an article featuring a little girl who looks extremely familiar, and a man who looks like her dad.

It's not the photograph that catches her eye, though; it's the title. Block letters clearly claiming Henry Lopez is a reformed man, a man who was brainwashed into doing evil and has now seen the error of his ways. The article goes on and on about how he inadvertently helped Countess Crusade through her evil plans, believing her intentions were good. Rachel's not sure how anyone would believe words so stilted, at least until he gets to the part where authorities claimed to have uncovered no reprehensible actions in his past and agreed to close his case once he started giving away names and information like he'd been a spy all along.

The moral of the article seems to be: nothing says absolution like ratting your friends out.

And it doesn't help much, either, because he could have been a sidekick, or not had any powers at all.

"Rachel," Finn says cautiously, sounding somewhat alarmed, and Rachel drops the pieces of paper she's holding into the box and darts across the sanctum until she's sitting before the computer, watching the coordinates for the ballroom on the top floor of the hotel soar.

Literally, up into the sky, detached from the rest of the hotel and everything. "What the—"

"I think you may have to fly us there after all," says Finn.

"Was that planned?" Rachel yells into her earpiece, completely senseless compensation for the fact that she's still trying to tune it back into the right line. "Was I supposed to expect the ballroom to do that?" she tries, but there's no answer. Bright side is, the green dots on the screen don't seem to be running around in a collective blind panic. She turns to Finn, leaving the earpiece on just in case. "How did that happen?"

"How should I know?" Finn says. "Still, unless your dads decided to randomly collaborate to rip out a building story and then steer it into the heavens, I'm guessing a technopath is involved."

Rachel grimaces. "I hate technopaths."

"You like Artie," Finn points out.

"I hate evil technopaths." And she does. They're more trouble than they're worth, and they waste the earth's resources on devices that generally get confiscated before they're even used.

"We don't know this one's evil yet," says Finn. "There's no panic, no weirdness. Just the misplaced orange dot and your suspicions." Rachel throws him a glare. "Not that you don't have a point, because you do," he adds abruptly, "definitely."

"Thanks," Rachel says, except it's entirely possible she doesn't. She's not going to admit that out loud, but she's always been somewhat prone to overreacting, and actions she categorized under 'better safe than sorry' turned out to be, in hindsight, more along the lines of 'better well-informed than safe'. And obviously her dads can take care of themselves, have fought and beat dozens of villains in their years as a superhero team and Rachel never actively helped, but just like doing surveillance gave her a certain peace of mind, now it seems like the only way she'll get some sleep tonight is figuring out what's going on, who that orange dot is, why that orange dot looks like Santana up close.

"So we're doing something," Finn assumes, looking kind of jittery about it. "Should I call my mom so she knows what happened to me if I go missing or, uh, die?"

"Don't be so melodramatic," Rachel says, then states, "I am going to call your nanny." Finn frowns in confusion. "She quit journalism because she couldn't stand large crowds, right? So she's probably not at the party, therefore it is feasible for us to reach her."

 

It takes three and a half rings for someone to pick up the phone.

"Hello?" says a male voice, vaguely familiar. Like, a teacher's—and then Rachel remembers her dads went to Mr. Schuester and Miss Pillsbury's housewarming party just a few months ago, when Rachel was busy cramming for finals.

"Hello, is Emma Pillsbury there?"

"Emma!" he yells, voice muffled by his palm. When Miss Pillsbury's heels become distinguishable over the phone, Mr. Schuester tells her, "There's a student on the phone seeking your guidance." Rachel's seeking Emma's journalistic integrity, actually, but she figures this is not the time for pointless specificity.

"Miss Pillsbury?" Rachel says, and flinches when Miss Pillsbury cheerfully guesses her name.

She must keep quiet for longer than necessary, because the next thing Miss Pillsbury says is, "Is something wrong?"

"I was hoping you might help me figure that out," Rachel answers. "Is this a bad time?"

"Oh, no, not at all," Miss Pillsbury says, and then comes the noise of a chair being dragged across wooden floor boards. Well, at least Rachel's sure she has Miss Pillsbury's attention now. "What do you need?"

Rachel takes a deep breath and says, "I need background information on Henry Lopez. Nothing confidential, just—you followed his case, correct? How exactly did he go from accomplice to prosecutor?"

"Oh," Miss Pillsbury says. It is kind of a weird question to spring on someone. "Well, there was a lot of slightly morally muddy behavior," Miss Pillsbury says. "Morally muddy but legally sound. He turned seven wanted villains in and led the police into Countess Crusade's headquarters. He seemed to have stored a lot of information any normal accomplice to a supervillain wouldn't bother with, like security codes and addresses and discarded plans and how the," she lowers her voice, "Lifter," and speaks normally again, "had been built."

"So he really was a spy all along?" Rachel asks, trying to make it sound like a genuine question.

"According to the jury, yes," says Miss Pillsbury.

"So you're not sure," Rachel encourages.

"No, Rachel, I'm not, but that's speculation, not fact, and I'm your teacher, and I used to be a journalist—someone like me should not speculate."

"That case is closed, Miss Pillsbury, there are no cans of worms to be reopened," Rachel says. "And I know about confidentiality and not brainwashing students, and I think I can take whatever you have to say and think it over before it puts any conspiratorial theories in my head. I just need to know. It could really make a difference right now."

"Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

"If I manage to figure it out, yes, most definitely," Rachel lies.

"Okay, let me—Shaman. That was Henry Lopez's hero alias."

"He was a hero?" Rachel asks honestly. She hasn't heard of a lot of heroes who didn't have any powers, and it feels strange to have confirmation that, if nothing else, Santana did lie to her.

"Well, someone who can successfully swap bodies with anyone without their consent usually qualifies as a hero. He acted mostly as a sidekick to Countess Crusade before he supposedly lost his power, though."

"Lost," Rachel echoes.

"Well," Miss Pillsbury says reluctantly, "he declared he hadn't used it well and thus had decided he didn't deserve it, so he threw himself in the vat of toxic waste he'd fallen in as a child until tests showed he had no powers anymore."

The question Rachel is supposed to ask comes with startling clarity to her. "Did he have it before those stunts?"

Emma chuckles softly, something like pride seeping through the sound. "Nobody had time to check."

"And the court dictated the Lifter had never been used—based on information Henry Lopez himself had provided."

"Exactly."

"Well, that's not suspicious at all," Finn says, giving Rachel an apologetic look. It's somewhat reassuring to know she's not the only one who's drawing conclusions from speculation, because—if what she's thinking is true, Santana's random changes in behavior make a lot more sense—the way she just went from bullying people to being nice to spreading ridiculous rumors about her best friend so thoroughly and without much of an explanation, so remarkably differently from the way Quinn adapted and adapted until she could let herself want Rachel.

"Weren't there—back in July or so, weren't there a few stories on the news about Countess Crusade claiming they had the wrong person?" Rachel asks, and startles when both Finn and Miss Pillsbury say yes at the same time.

"Now, why did you need to know all this?" Miss Pillsbury adds.

Rachel bites her lip and looks at Finn for support. She could be wrong, but she can't risk doing nothing and being right.

So she says, "I think Countess Crusade has been occupying Henry Lopez's daughter's body since her two weeks of parole last June."

*
"That's why the computer doesn't recognize Santana," Finn says after an appropriately solemn amount of seconds for the information to sink in has passed.

"Oh wow," Miss Pillsbury says. "Is this about that party? Are you—I mean, are you going to—"

"Well, yes, if... We need a ride," Rachel says. "Top floor has gone anti-gravity."

"The top floor of the hotel? How does—oh, technopath, okay. Um," Miss Pillsbury says. Then she says, "Do you know anybody who can fly? Rachel Berry needs an emergency ride to a floating ballroom", but she's clearly not asking Rachel.

"Tell her to call Ken," Mr. Schuester suggests.

"That's a great—that's a great idea," Miss Pillsbury tells him, and then, for Rachel's benefit, "you should call Ken—Ken Tanaka, the bus driver?"

"I have his card," Rachel says promptly.

"Oh," Miss Pillsbury says, "Oh. All right. Great. Do you want us to help or—"

"No, I'm—we're good," Rachel says, "I think." It doesn't seem right to endanger Miss Pillsbury's life when it's highly unlikely they'll need someone to glow in the dark for them.

"Hey, Rachel, it's Mr. Schuester here," Rachel hears. "Just wanted to say, remember to stay calm, okay? Remember that even if you're right about this, it's still entirely possible there's nothing going on at that party. Especially if they swapped bodies so long ago."

"That doesn't make it any less important to catch Countess Crusade and put her back in jail," Rachel points out.

"Yes, exactly. So you need to make sure she attempts something dangerous enough for the police to investigate. They're not just going to go, hey, a high-school freshman thinks an incarcerated supervillain stole a power from an old sidekick and used it years later to swap bodies with his teenage daughter. They're not just going to bring the offspring of a respected member of hero society in for tests on your suspicions alone. And you could be wrong."

"Thanks, Mr. Schuester," Rachel says, though it's more of a pleasantry than anything else, "I'll keep that in mind," and hangs up.

To be fair, though, Rachel didn't actually plan to show up and point at Santana and say 'someone arrest that criminal!' but she probably needs a plan before she jumps on a flying bus. And she has material—she has the top floor and roof mapped out over the screens right before her, and half of the security cameras are still sending out a signal, so there's no harm in checking for the Lifter—or any Lifter-sized devices, boxes, whatever—again.

Finn coughs, and Rachel looks back at him for a second. "What?" she says, as nice as she possibly can.

"If you don't tell Quinn before you possibly go send her mother back to prison, she's going to give you more than just the cold shoulder after this," Finn mentions, voice tinny and hands raised in an attempt to keep Rachel from snapping at him when he's only trying to help. "I'm just saying."

Rachel considers this—she doesn't want to risk Quinn's life or power or anything. If Countess Crusade was the one who spread the rumor last week, Rachel is not the only one who wants Quinn Fabray far away from that party. It crosses her mind to use Quinn as bait—if she's there, maybe Countess Crusade won't do anything. Or maybe she will anyway, and that's not something Rachel wants to let happen.

The thing is, something needs to happen, and if something happens and Quinn finds out about it through word of mouth or official announcements, she really won't forgive Rachel, ever. And Rachel knows better than to believe Quinn will just stay back and let Rachel and Finn deal with things if Rachel lets her in on what may be going on.

So she's getting Quinn involved in this, which is great. Just wonderful.

 

She calls Ken Tanaka.

"We just talked to Miss Pillsbury," she says, and he interrupts, "Is this some kind of cruel joke?"

Rachel frowns and scrunches her nose. His voice is rough, like he just woke up from a nap, but he also sounds like he gets stuff like this fairly often. Rachel makes a mental note to find out why. "No," she replies. "There was something extremely important I had to ask her, and you told me to call you whenever I needed a ride. I'm sorry there has been no prior warning, but a somewhat unexpected situation has arisen, and this is that time."

"'This'? As in, right now?"

"Yes, right now," Rachel says. Ken doesn't answer until Rachel adds, "My dads may be in danger."

She hears a noise, something hard and delicate smashing into something much harder and not even remotely as delicate, and then Ken's saying, "Okay, I'll be right there," at the same time as Finn mutters Rachel's name. Finn mutters. Rachel covers the receiver with her hand and mouths what.

"Quinn," he reminds her.

Rachel groans before uncovering the phone. "Mr. Tanaka, is there any chance you could pick Quinn Fabray up on the way here?"

Ken laughs. "Long as you don't plan on shedding her blood on my bus."

"That's a little macabre," Rachel informs him, and then, "but no. There's just some information she might want to know."

*
She senses the bus turn the corner into her road before she can see it through the big window in the living room, quietly rolling down the asphalt like any other owl bus. It's bizarre to see such a significant splash of yellow against the dark night sky, under the localized flashes from the street lamps, but as far as Rachel can see the show isn't reaching the curiosity or even knowledge of her neighbors.

There's a bit of noise when the door opens, though it doesn't take Rachel long to realize that has less to do with the vehicle and more with the amount of people inside of it. For some reason, Ken has brought not just Quinn, but a number of people Rachel's sure could pass as a small army.

Quinn is the only one who gets off the bus, though, and it almost seems like she's instructed everybody else not to make any moves towards the door, and Rachel would care, would try to send them home, but she needs to tell Quinn a handful of things she'd really rather not, so she might deal with that later.

For now, she just waits for Quinn to step into hearing range to ask, "What's with the militia?"

Quinn laughs. "They're heroes, Berry," she says, hands set firmly on her hips. "They're programmed to hear the word 'emergency' and jump. Besides, you sent a bus."

"It was the only—"

"If you'd sent a motorcycle, I might have come alone."

Rachel bites the inside of her cheek. "Okay," she says. "Either way, I think you want to hear this without an audience, so," Rachel attempts, brushing her fingers against Quinn's wrist to invite her in. Quinn's face falls somehow—she didn't exactly look happy before, but there's still a difference, a light widening of her eyes, a new tightness in her mouth. "I mean it," Rachel says, anyway. They're not going to get through this if they try to make light of it before she's told Quinn anything disturbing.

They walk into the library—Finn is still in the sanctum, humming over the sound of the computers working overtime, and Quinn plops herself down in one of the black armchairs.

Rachel almost sits down, but instead elects to lean against the edge of the desk so she can walk towards Quinn and hug her or hold her hand or whatever she deems necessary after telling her this.

"So what is it?" Quinn says, eyes on the open door to the metal poles leading into the sanctum. "What's going on?"

Rachel takes a deep breath. "Look at me," she pleads, and Quinn does. "I think your—I think Countess Crusade switched bodies with Santana a few months ago."

Quinn frowns. "What are you talking about?" she blurts out.

"Okay, um," Rachel begins. "I can totally get this out," she tells herself, and tries again. "Henry Lopez, Santana's dad? He was supposed to be an accomplice to Countess Crusade, and his power was bodyswapping. According to the authorities, he willingly lost it after convincing everyone he was a good man and wanted to fight against Countess Crusade, rather than for. At first he was just a witness against her, but eventually he became her prosecutor. He was the one who provided the evidence about the Lifter never having been used."

"I don't understand," Quinn says, but she's tearing up, like she's realizing—like she's realizing that this means Santana has been mistakenly in solitary since June, that her implicit approval of Quinn's choice to befriend Rachel was a lie, a scheme, and worst of all—that her mother is really as bad as Quinn's been told time and time again she was.

God, Rachel hates to see Quinn like this. Her own eyes are watering, and it's awful, but she has to pull through, so she says, "What if—what if it was? What if the Lifter was used? What if—what if nobody, nobody but him knew about Countess Crusade's little extra power, and when she got released on parole nobody checked or deactivated that ability because they didn't know it was there?"

Quinn scowls. Her mouth wobbles and she chuckles once, almost a snort, raw and the opposite of amused. "See, I told you the Lifter would be useful if you guys weren't such puritans. I told you. The Lifter just takes whatever you have, whether the person holding it knows you have it or not. See, that's—" She lifts a hand to cover her mouth. "I think I'm going to throw up," she says, and then runs out of the library and in the general direction of the Berries' downstairs bathroom.

Rachel considers going after her to—hold her hair, or stroke her back or whatever it is you do when someone's heightened emotional tension causes them to be sick, but then Finn's yelling up at Rachel that he might have found the Lifter and it seems like the rightest thing for Rachel to check that out before whatever signal the computer's picking up on vanishes.

 

Quinn doesn't seem particularly bothered about not having been attended to when she slides down into the sanctum. The edges of her hair are wet, her lips are swollen, there's not a trace of make-up on her face anymore, and she's pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail. She looks beautiful, in a very real kind of way.

"We know where the Lifter may be," Rachel says optimistically. "Where it probably is. I'm not leaping to conclusions this time, I actually am right."

Quinn's face falls for an instant, but she recovers awfully quick and says, "I thought you'd already found it," shaking her head in confusion. "Anyway—"

Rachel frowns. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm great," she says, glancing around, then repeats, "Anyway, you need to call Artie."

"What?" Rachel snaps. "No, seriously, you just—how can you be okay?"

Quinn shakes her head. "You sent the school bus to practically kidnap me in the middle of the night on a Saturday," Quinn says. "Seemed a little extreme unless there was an emergency, so I brought mood stabilizers. I can have a meltdown tomorrow morning, once I take care of everything."

"You're not taking over this," Rachel says firmly.

"We're trying to defeat my mother, Rachel."

Oh, no, she's not letting Quinn put her foot down about this. "Who you barely even know," Rachel points out. "You're not an authority on the subject, you know."

Quinn nods. "I know. But I've got a fresh perspective on this, and you don't. If you don't agree with my ideas, feel free to cut in. If you do, leave any suggestions for later. We need to figure this out now so we can fill everyone in."

"Everyone?" Finn asks.

"Yes, everyone," Quinn snaps. "If we're going to do this, we're going to do it with backup and some semblance of a plan. Besides, the more people who show up, the more likely Santana is to believe we're attending her party because we've forgiven her."

Rachel sighs. "Fine. What do you have in mind?"

Quinn smiles. "Thanks. Okay, first, we call Artie. We need San—the bad guy to whip out the Lifter, but we don't want her to cause any harm, so we need a technopath to fix it."

"'m on that," Finn says, picking up the phone.

"Fix it how?" asks Rachel.

Quinn scowls at her. "Inconspicuously. We need to distract any duplicates the bad guy may have around so Artie can go in, deactivate the Lifter and leave without being seen. We need to distract her and if we get there late, we might need to delay her taking the stage. She's supposed to do this ballet number we put together over the summer, and there's a substantial chance she'll want to pull her little stunt when everybody's paying attention to her."

Rachel's about to ask how Quinn thinks they may be able to delay Santana's performance when Finn hangs up, twirls his chair a couple of times, like this is somehow exciting for him, and reports.

"Artie says he can't deactivate a ray gun without bringing heavy, suspicious-looking tools and material, but he may be able to reverse the thing with the help of a pyro," he says. "He also says he's hanging out with Kurt and Tina and they're both set on tagging along. So that bus was probably a good idea."

Rachel groans, but Quinn just chuckles. "As I said," she remarks cheerfully, "everyone."

*
Most of the sidekicks live in the same part of town as Rachel, so soon enough the bus is bubbling with people and anticipation.

After Quinn carefully explains the plan to everyone, she hands out copies of the floor plan and tells them where the Lifter is most likely to be stored and where Santana—"Countess Crusade, whatever," Quinn says, "let's just call her the bad guy."—may have positioned duplicates to guard it.

"I can distract up to three duplicates if it comes down to that," Puck offers.

"Right," Rachel says incredulously, "wait, what kind of distracting are we talking about?" Puck waggles his eyebrows, and Rachel grimaces. "No. God, that's—no."

Puck snorts. "My power is turning into a giant rock monster. Do you want to win this fight, or do you want the duplicate to report back to Santana that there's weird stuff going on where she's keeping the stolen goods she may or may not be planning to use illegally later?"

"And you want me to believe you're actually able to pull that off?"

"Are you kidding me? Those duplicates are easy—all of the sassiness and none of the celibacy crap. Plus, I've been doing this for months. It's a breeze."

Finn frowns, and Rachel feels a pang of pain in her chest. Poor thing. "She cheated on me?" he says, eyes wide.

"Dude. Sophomore, dating a freshman? She had to get her needs met somewhere."

"It's highly likely you were dating a forty-year-old supervillain—" Puck's smirk just grows brighter at that, which is kind of gross. "—who was manipulating you to get to me, anyway. I wouldn't take it personally."

"Oh, great, remind me I made out with an old lady, Rachel, thanks," Finn says, grimacing, and leans in when Tina strokes his forearm supportively.

"Anytime," Rachel says brightly.

"Oh, look, floor plans," Artie says when they get to him, voice dripping with sarcasm. "You guys don't happen to have any diagrams or charts or maps that will actually help me dismantle the machine that might just cut all of our careers short, do you?"

*
The only surface the bus fits in is the roof, and given the fact that this building story has been turned anti-gravity by a technopath it really shouldn't surprise Rachel so much that the floor doesn't wobble an inch when they land.

Quinn smiles and nods to herself just the one time, meeting Rachel's gaze from the front seat where she's sitting sideways now that the bus has stopped flying, her knees bumping together under the armrest. That's Rachel's cue to explain how and where and when each one of them is walking into the party before sending them all off with weather- and gravity- proofed earpieces and instructions to report back to Rachel by the minute.

Rachel and Quinn are the last ones to get off the bus—Finn is waiting for them on the roof, looking up and around like he's never bothered climbing up the fire escape at school, which—he probably hasn't, come to think of it.

"Tina's gone down the air vent," Kurt reports in her ear. "Her ferret fur looks surprisingly shiny," he muses.

"Thanks, Kurt," she says, and Kurt makes a noncommittal sound of acknowledgment. Then, she looks up at Quinn. "Are you sure it's a good idea for her to know you're here?"

"Yeah," Quinn replies. "You saw the place—it's wallpapered and carpeted, barely any mirrors—there's nothing that could accidentally deflect the trajectory of a laser ray onto me. She might have shunned me for extra safety, if that's even what she was trying to do, but it wouldn't be the first time she's pulled one of these stunts with her daughter in the room. And babies are way more fickle than I am now."

"You sure?" It's just—Rachel doesn't want Quinn to do something she'll regret. Their excuse to be here is seeing the choreography Quinn created for Santana and Finn saw Santana rehearse more than once. Rachel is mostly their plus one, though the main reason she wants to be in the ballroom is to make sure her dads are safe and control things from an advantage point near the villain they're trying to defeat.

"Yeah, come on," Quinn says, "let's get this mission started."

"Excuse me?" Mercedes's voice comes through the earpiece, sudden and a little scary. "Tina could get squashed in those vents. I don't see you turning into a rat to open a door from the inside of a room containing a stolen, mended, illegal, dangerous machine."

"That's because I cannot turn into a rat, Mercedes," Rachel says, "but you're right," offering a meaningful look to Quinn. They may be captaining the operation, which is why they should be well-aware it's already underway. "I apologize. Quinn should have said, 'let's walk into that ballroom now'."

"Good," Mercedes says, and misses the death glare Quinn's directing at Rachel's right ear.

 

They go in through the biggest balcony.

When she spots Quinn, Santana looks like a giant rock monster just punched her in the gut. Rachel has a sweet moment of confusion, of pondering whether maybe Puck is irresponsible for that, but no, it's all surprise. It's all Quinn.

It's also Quinn who smiles bright and tells Santana about the ballet choreography and how it really should be hoes over bros at all times, and how much it hurts Quinn that Santana would ever stoop to dissolving their friendship over a boy neither one of them had any interest in, and just as she was thinking that earlier she realized she herself was allowing it, inadvertently taking the same wrong stance, at which point Rachel zones out.

She zones out because listening to Quinn rave over her other best friend gets a little annoying after a while, and if Rachel listened to her instincts and told Santana—whether she's the real Santana or not—that Quinn's much better off without her and Rachel's there for all her best-friend needs, the conversation would derail into disaster. She can just picture Quinn forgetting about the mission and freezing Rachel for being so—so—for being so insecure.

So zoning out is definitely best. Besides, if she listens in closely to her earpiece while ignoring the rest of the world, she can distinguish Puck saying, "Didn't you want me to side with you?" It's hard to hear not because he's not wearing the earpiece right, but because he's attempting some kind of seductive susurration. Frankly, it's kind of embarrassing, but whichever duplicate—whoever it is—he's talking to doesn't seem to have the same urge to call him a few unflattering names as Rachel does. "This is me, siding with you. If you give me that chance, I'll always side with you," and Rachel can't help thinking that, if he looks as genuine as he sounds—and he sounds like he honestly believes he's talking Santana Lopez, girl he's been dating on and off since last year, into giving him the time of day—he might just have a future in show business.

There's a metal noise, then, and Rachel tsks until Mercedes says, "Tina got the door, we're in."

She makes a beeline for her dads, because she doesn't want to give them a heart attack just by being there unexpectedly. Her dad Steve just greets and hugs her, saying, "See? I told you everything would be okay. And look, temporary anti-gravity! One of these days there will be a device anyone can use to be closer to the stars without disrupting the world or accidentally offing themselves."

Rachel frowns, and her dad John laughs. "So what are you doing here?"

Rachel regains her composure quickly. "Came to see Santana's ballet recital. I was bored at home, right?" she tells him, widening her eyes meaningfully. "And Quinn called, and she and Santana choreographed Santana's number together, and she broke down into tears because she really wanted to see it and we flew up here. To see her recital."

"I see Finn's here, too," her dad points out.

"He was involved in rehearsing," she lies. Except it's not a lie, but the context is a lie, therefore the little truthful things within it transmit messages that have nothing to do with the truth. Id est, lies. But it's not like she can just tell her dads that Countess Crusade is in the room. For one thing, Countess Crusade is not Voldemort—if her name is heard, people don't flee. They just step closer with an urge to know what's going on. After all, Countess Crusade is in jail, so she can't hurt them. And society moms are gossips, so it would get to Countess Crusade immediately, and the Lifter would stay where it is, and Countess Crusade would do nothing, and, potential new stunts aside, Santana—the real one—would be kept in solitary at least one more night.

Rachel thinks that's the only reason Quinn is doing all this. They're not active heroes yet; if it were just a villain, even Rachel would have done the legal thing and let her dads deal with it. But this is more than just that.

"I can definitely do this," Artie announces, and Rachel has to pull on the hem of her sweater to keep from floating.

It makes Rachel feel incredibly jittery that she can't really do anything, though, just watch over Santana—Countess Crusade—whoever and make sure she doesn't leave the ballroom, waiting and hoping everything's going okay and trying not to snap when Kurt says, "I think they may know I'm here."

Rachel scowls at no one. "Know how?"

"I turned into goo to go through the slit under the door and one of the duplicates slipped on me and vanished," he says. "It may or may not have been aware of me in particular, but I'm going in," and Rachel spots him immediately, smiling and somehow—fitting in. Rachel raises her eyebrows, and Kurt waves at her, offering a self-sufficient shrug over, if Rachel isn't mistaken, Puck's mom's shoulder. "Oh, I'm dying to watch Santana's performance," he's telling her, and Rachel's just glad there's no commotion to speak of.

She's trying to block out Kurt's gushing and the ridiculous whimpery sounds of a second Santana duplicate being seduced by Puck when a waitress jumps on stage and almost blows everyone's eardrums out by testing the microphone.

"So," she says finally, "now that you've all wined and dined and danced your hearts out, our host's daughter Santana would like to show you something very special she prepared for all of you," and everyone turns to watch Santana do a silly curtsy then spin on her heel to leave, just as Artie's saying, "I heard that," and Rachel's fear is coming on full force.

"How much longer do you need?" Rachel says, swaying like she's singing to herself and smiling to fend off a couple of tipsy-looking fifty-something ladies.

"A while," says Artie, "unless you want Crusade to get her hands on the real thing and drain everyone's powers into it."

"Just hold them off," Mercedes orders plainly.

Rachel may be awkward or 'not play well with others', but she's good in a crisis. She's good at thinking on the spot and making a decision in a split second. In this case, her decision consists in running up the two steps to the stage and calling Santana's name to keep her inside the ballroom when she's barely four steps away from the hallway.

Grabbing Quinn's sleeve and dragging her along is more of an afterthought. Or possibly an accident.

"If you don't mind waiting a bit," she blurts out, holding onto the mic stand until the waitress gives her enough room to stand behind it. "I'd like to sing a song."

"Does panic always do this to you?" Quinn mutters, scowling, but intercepts the microphone Rachel throws at her, and some waving and flailing gets the keyboardist on her stool and the first notes from the first carol that comes to Rachel's mind in the air.

"Oh the weather outside is frightful," Rachel begins, throwing a meaningful look at Quinn.

"It's actually pretty nice for mid-December," Quinn mentions, getting a wave of surprised laughter from the crowd.

"But the fire is so delightful," she goes on, and Quinn rolls her eyes just as Kurt says into Rachel's earpiece, "If that were a pun, it would cost us the mission." Rachel coughs pointedly before going on, "And since we've," looking directly at Quinn.

"No place to go," Quinn joins in, a little stiff, but Rachel can work with that. "Let it snow," Quinn offers, voice tinny, and Rachel joins in, and the third 'let it snow' even comes out kind of in sync.

"Artie's almost done," comes Mercedes's voice through Rachel's earpiece, just as Quinn's singing, "It doesn't show signs of stopping," and Rachel nods at her like it has anything to do with the song. Quinn seems to understand.

"And I've bought some corn for popping," and then they're actually singing a duet, words falling into place, sweet and confident. It's fun, and Quinn looks like she's enjoying herself, but there's still that nagging feeling at the back of Rachel's mind that she could do a much better job on a song like this if Mercedes and Kurt had the decency to stop talking through it.

Not that she doesn't appreciate Mike telling her he's successfully saved Mercedes from death by impalement on a window fence, or Artie's claim that if the reversion doesn't work he'll eat his right wheel, or hearing Tina's voice with that tiny hint of a squeal quality it gets when she transforms back from her ferret form. She doesn't appreciate the realization that Puck seemingly isn't done with his part of the plan yet and has kept his earpiece on, surely just to torture Rachel, but he's easy enough to ignore.

Santana turns to leave when they reach the last verse, and Rachel's eyes follow her out of the room like they may somehow slow down the process, or skip forward to when everything's said and done, but it's just waiting, and waiting, and getting off the stage and watching a dozen duplicates set all party guests, including Quinn and Rachel, in groups of five or six around the room, a make-believe theater auditorium that would make for a lovely performance if that were what was going to happen next. Finn gets a place near the piano, and shows his hands to Rachel as if to say he's more than ready to grow vines out of his fingers if that's what it comes down to.

And then Countess Crusade—and it's her now, costume and all, gasps going throughout the audience, not so much fear as curiosity, because it's still Santana's face over the collar, it's still possible this is all part of some avant-garde ballet—takes the stage. She's holding the Lifter behind her, smaller than Rachel remembers it being, like she's fixed it so it won't look like the real thing.

Rachel focuses on the fact that it can be fixed.

*
She doesn't even bother with a speech. At least not one long enough to be considered a speech, though Rachel has the feeling her few words have been rehearsed extensively.

"Well, hello there," she says. "I really thought I'd never see you guys again." The pianist is playing something soft, slowing down between words, but Rachel still recognizes it as Tchaikovsky. "Some of you may remember me—from the papers, from working with me, from working against me, putting me in solitary like I ever did anything wrong."

"Okay, that is definitely not Santana," Puck mutters through the earpiece, and Rachel spots him on one of the balconies, looking in from the doorway.

"So I may have had a different face back then. A prettier one, blonde hair, legal drinking age. I'll get all that back when I'm certain nobody will stop me from trying."

There are more whispers, talking, more 'what the fuck's than Rachel has ever heard in her life put together, and everyone starts fidgeting, though no one's quite sure they should move to leave. No one's quite sure this isn't part of the recital. In Rachel's opinion, if there's a possibility that this is not part of it, they should run. Whether there is a possibility that it is or not. But then Rachel's always been too practical, apparently.

And then Santana raises the Lifter at Rapids, at Rachel's dad and the room falls silent.

Rachel's heart starts racing. From her place mere feet away from the stage, looking over the freakishly even tan of Santana's duplicate's shoulder, trying not to fight her hold, Rachel finds herself breathing deep, but nothing happens, and then she finds herself holding her breath, like she can pause the world with the strength of her mind, even though that's not her power.

She trusts these people. She does. It has to work.

The hold on her waist softens, and for a moment Rachel's terrified that's all the Lifter is going to do: strip Santana's body off her ability to multiply. Maybe nothing else crossed over in the switch; maybe there's no way to send Countess Crusade back into her body without convincing the judge to let her out again.

Or maybe—maybe this is enough. Dozens of witnesses, a handful of them police officers, just saw a girl they thought was Santana Lopez operate a device only a technopath could.

It's all right. Everything's going to be okay. Nobody here wants their powers taken away; they'll stop her.

The duplicates don't dematerialize, though; they just look extremely confused. Looking up at that stage, she notices that so does Santana—Finn has wrapped a few vines around her waist, and she's not even defending herself. They look tight, but not too tight to breathe, and she looks completely bewildered, saying, "What is—what's going on? Dad?"

It takes a few seconds for her father to absorb what's just happened and run.

Run only God knows where, because they're floating, but he doesn't get very far anyway. Kurt is right there, goo on the wooden floorboards for him to slip right off, and anyway, by the time Henry Lopez hits his head on the window seat and slides back over Kurt to collapse into Puck's giant rock monster, Mike has stretched out his limbs and immobilized Mr. Lopez's arms behind his back.

And then they're all falling down, positions held by force of will and will alone.

*
So, well, maybe it's Rachel—and Quinn—who orchestrates everything, but in the small scheme of things, it's Artie who saves the day.

Everyone chimes in, really. Everyone deserves credit.

But they'd be dead if it weren't for Artie.

They also wouldn't have been able to call the police if Artie hadn't technopathed the hotel floor back into its roots, architecture and intangible technology alike, so, yeah, he probably deserves the spotlight.

That doesn't stop Rachel from feeling incredibly jealous, because they wouldn't be here if it weren't for her, but there are better things for her to do right now.

Talking to Quinn is one of them.

*
The hotel decides to keep the party going—the scare is good enough for everyone to want some more booze flowing through their veins before they go home and sleep off the surrealism of what just happened—and Rachel finds herself walking up to the roof with Quinn, just needing a bit of air, a bit of a talk.

"You can drop the act now," Rachel says, cautious, glancing at her feet. She hopes Quinn knows this is just a formality. She doesn't want Quinn to suddenly say it has all been an act, but—it would be wrong not to give her the chance to do so.

"I didn't know," Quinn says. "Santana's dad was my mom's prosecutor. I've only known Santana for less than a year. My mom's known her since she was six. Probably hated her since she was six. Been planning this since she was six, oh God."

Rachel can't help the grin, wide with overwhelming relief, happiness. "Okay," she says, nodding and feeling kind of stupid about it, "okay. I believe you."

Quinn frowns for a second, like she's considering paying Rachel back for all the heartache she's put them both through, but then she grins, bright and toothy and happy, and holds on tight to Rachel's hips when Rachel steps into her personal space, cradles her face with both hands and kisses her.

Eventually she realizes Quinn's arms are reaching up to hold on to her and she's standing on tiptoes and her head is bent all the way back just to reach her lips. Rachel's eyes are still closed, but with all that information it doesn't take a scientist to assess what's going on—and fix it.

"Sorry," she says when her feet are back on the roof. She stretches her arms out for Quinn to hold onto her. "Come on, I'll take you home."

"Like, flying?" Quinn asks with an amused scowl. "Uh, no."

"Seriously, it's safe."

"No, it's not safe. You will drop me and kill me, and my ashes will sue your ass."

"My dad does it all the time and he doesn't have superstrength either."

"Well, yeah, but have you seen the muscles on that man?" Quinn says. "Besides, apparently I haven't seen Santana in a while, and it's a Christmas party. Let's go have some eggnog."

"I don't know how eggnog is going to help," Rachel says.

Quinn shakes her head. "It's not so much the eggnog as the alcohol in it, and how Puck just emptied an extra flask of it in." Rachel fervently hopes she's not dating an alcoholic in the making. "Don't worry, I've lived with having a neglectful supervillain for a mom for years," Quinn says, "an attempted escape from confinement will not lead me to self-destruction." She moves to leave, but before she's reached the door to the stairs she turns around and says, "If you decide to stay, look for me when you come back in. I'll save you a dance."

Rachel stays on the roof for a while, and joins them once there are only three police officers staying behind and Santana's already been informally interrogated and made to promise she'll swing by the office on Monday, according to Rachel's dads.

She approaches Quinn just as Santana's saying, "What's Rachel Berry doing here, anyway?"

"Uh," Quinn says, "I'm dating her. I think."

Rachel takes the few steps separating them and determinedly tells Quinn, "You're dating me," and Quinn smiles like she really wishes she didn't have to—with no teeth and small dimples forming adoringly around the corners of her lips. For all that is, her eyes smile even brighter.

Santana snorts. "A freshman, Quinn?" she says, but without any real bite. "Really?"

Quinn laughs, low and deep and honest and not offended at all, and Santana smiles back at her and Rachel has to wonder how Quinn didn't realize this girl she'd been hanging out with since June wasn't the same girl she hung out with all through last year. Then again, it's extremely easy for Rachel to list down the tiny chance happenings whose nonexistence would have meant a prolonged archenmity between her and Quinn Fabray, instead of whatever is going on between them now. Instead of something good.

"I'm feeling a little offended right now," Rachel points out.

"She's my best friend," Quinn says, shrugging, her smile still bright.

*
They use the bus to get back; Ken is waiting for them, after all, and he ends up moonlighting as a designated driver for half of Henry Lopez's guests. Santana goes back home with her mom, who doesn't stop hugging her and sobbing into her hair as they make their way to the elevator; both Puck and Mike get a ride from Puck's mom, and Brittany, who attended the party legitimately, and Tina live nearby, so they share a cab home.

Quinn's dad left with the police to go answer some questions, so Quinn stops by her house to grab some night clothes and gets back on the bus up to Rachel's stop.

"I think I forgot to say thank you," she tells Ken, flushing a little. "I am extremely grateful for your help tonight, Mr. Tanaka."

Ken smiles easy, proud. "One thing I'm good at," he says, "gotta make the most of it."

Rachel smiles back.

"Don't make me say this twice," Quinn says when the bus is gone, and then, "you may deserve a reward for all that we just went through." Rachel frowns. "You think you can fly me to the roof landing near your window?"

It's not much of an honor, and Rachel makes sure Quinn is aware of this, but they have to start somewhere.

She's not sure why they worried, though, because Quinn seems to defy gravity the minute Rachel's hands meet behind her shoulder blades, holding her close. It doesn't even feel like flying at first, not like those episodes produced by relief Rachel's had before; she's hugging Quinn, first, and flying is more of an afterthought.

They end up snacking on cereal while they wait for Rachel's dads to get home.

"You want me to take the couch?" Rachel offers between mouthfuls, though the couch is terrible for her back. It just seems like the right thing to do.

"Don't be stupid, we can share a bed," Quinn says. "As long as you promise you won't try anything with me. At least not tonight."

"Quinn, you've been emotionally shaken like no ever should tonight. It would be irresponsible to take advantage."

Quinn looks like she's trying to stifle a laugh, but her face has softened, too. "Are you sure your dads will be okay with that? I am dating you."

"They'll understand," Rachel says. "They trust me."

And if they don't, she can just fly out the window and deal with it in the morning—right now she needs a warm bed and to sleep in until noon tomorrow.

She stays awake until her dads come up and walk in and tuck her in to make sure she's all right, anyway. If she's getting told off for this, she's not the only one who thinks it can wait.

*
Rachel waits until school on Wednesday to suggest Quinn should have a long talk with her mother—in jail, where she can't do anything weird like—turn Quinn's dress into a bodyswapping machine, since that power has been returned to Henry Lopez and is happily going unused in his cell.

"She didn't want you to be there," Rachel says. It just seems wrong to let that go unnoticed. "She spread a ridiculous rumor just so her daughter wouldn't get hurt at her next stunt. I think that means something."

"Yeah," Quinn says coldly, "it means there was a stunt."

"I know you desperately want to not be associated with her in any way, but it really might help if you talked to her. Got some closure."

There's a long silence; Rachel just watches Quinn's hands fidgeting with her fries throughout it, waits until Quinn looks up and says, "Okay, I'll keep that in mind. But don't get your hopes up."

Rachel smiles and takes Quinn's hand, right there in the middle of the hallway, and it's not the first time they do this, but it's the first time Quinn squeezes back and doesn't even flinch.

*
Christmas break is spent planning campaigns—campaigns for a Gay-Straight Alliance Mr. Schuester's been pushing for since his first marriage crumbled, now supported by Kurt's dad and Tina and Mercedes and the fact that Mr. Schuester has gotten himself a girlfriend who not only lives with him, but also feeds him pasta off her own plate in the school cafeteria. It's remarkably disgusting, but it also makes the PTA think, in that illogical way of theirs, that Mr. Schuester's not trying to found a club to fulfill his own perverted sexual desires.

Rachel likes Ms. Pillsbury, and she kind of likes Mr. Schue, so she puts up with their PDA. It's not like she can't just turn her chair back and face her lunch and her friends instead, anyway.

The point is, campaigns. For later classes and a second bus and also Quinn's going for class president, but she's already trying to get a Hero-Sidekick Alliance off the ground, piling all the official work on Brittany.

Rachel knew Quinn had talked to her mother, but she didn't expect anything this good to come out of it. Quinn said it had gone well, with a straight, cold, barely communicative face, so Rachel assumed they hadn't tried to kill each other, but she's made an effort not to ask because Quinn clearly doesn't want to talk about it. It's been tough, though also somewhat rewarding.

So there's a lot of campaigning, and the HSA actually goes over surprisingly well with the board. It probably helps that the student body president is Brittany and it's just not easy to deny her anything—and it's worthy of note just how remarkably Quinn's speech-writing abilities improve over the span of five weeks—but Rachel thinks the idea of it is just that good: it's about time someone gave credit to the work sidekicks do for their heroes and for society as a whole.

It's credit to how horribly busy she is that she completely forgets to tell her dads until February.

"Activism? You're doing activism now?" Steve asks, a little—offended. Like it's a bad thing that Rachel's month as potential Hero Support didn't vanish from history the minute she realized she could summon up storms.

Her other dad, though, says, "I think it's a good initiative. It's—" He tries to stifle a chuckle, but fails. "—heroic. Sorry, I had to say it."

And, because she's Rapids and Rock Ant's daughter, and saved everyone from getting their powers stolen by a supervillain, and has a little crazy flowing through her veins thanks to Whirl Girl, people actually join en masse. (It also doesn't hurt that Quinn Fabray's ready to freeze all the renegades, but that's off the record.) There's still picking on the less powerful ones, but the auditorium regularly fills up for their meetings, and Rachel really thinks they're getting through to their thick skulls.

To be honest, after all the breakthroughs and setbacks during the fall, her second semester feels so uneventful it's almost a letdown, but Rachel wouldn't change it for the world.